It was the fat girl who started it, the blonde girl two doors down. She was nothing more than a dumb guera, yet the girl’s parents had lovingly named her Holly twenty-two years before. Flor woke to hear the guera stupidly pounding on the walls, kicking at the door, until after fifteen minutes or so vigilant Cal took notice. He came, lurching down the stairs and up the hallway and the guera screamed at him. Cal took her up the stairs, slammed the door, and moments later came the muffled sound of a gunshot. Cal was short like that sometimes.

There’d been seven of them. At night they called out to each other, when the lights went out and they lay in the dark, the only illumination that of a small nightlight. Jimmy had come up with this brainstorm after one of the girls had screamed and thrashed about so much in the dark that she’d hurt herself, and Cal had been forced to take care of her. Jimmy had also come up with the great idea to pump in music – love songs mostly, sappy stuff like Jim Croce and Neil Diamond. It played all day long until the girls went crazy from hearing it, until finally the fluorescents overhead went dim and the nightlights came on and then all was quiet again for another worried night.

My first “real” story, published by A Twist of Noir. Read the rest here: http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.com/search/label/Kip%20Hanson