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This is one of several openings I've experimented with for my current fiction project. My intent is to write a short murder story that takes place in an office setting. The protagonist is an employee of this company who is ultimately driven to kill his boss.
I've tried various POVs with this piece, but the first person keeps feeling the most natural to me. I think this is partly due to my motivation for writing this story. Without writing a full-length novel, I want to explore fairly deeply the relationship between the protagonist and his boss. I also want the reader to feel empathy for the protagonist as he feels increasingly compelled to cause serious harm to this boss.
If this opening is effective, you'll want to keep reading to find out what he did that night and to learn more about this woman. Do you? Be honest, now.
In retrospect, I know that I should have acted differently that night. For starters, I shouldn't have stayed late at work to do that "assignment" she gave me. I should have just said to hell with her and just gone home at the end of the workday. At the very least, I should have gone home when I finally did finish her damn assignment so that she couldn't pull me into another argument. Dammit, if she just hadn't started in on me that one last time, I wouldn't be in here now.
God, that woman -- incredible. Incredible! Even now, after 18 months of the drudgery of this place, I can remember every detail of her face and all of our arguments word for word. Every day for the past 18 months, I've gone over in my mind every e-mail, every meeting, and every confrontation I ever had with her. And it's weird, because I've almost developed an awe for her technique. It's definitely something, how quickly she buggered my life into such total hell. It only took her nine weeks! Within nine weeks of her meeting me, she started the complete unravelling of everything that was good in my life.
Thinking back, it's not like she didn't get what she deserved in the end. And still, she barely suffered. Certainly she didn't suffer as much as she made us all suffer. But even so, she sure isn't the one sitting in a 12-by-6 cell for 18 hours a day. No, that would be me.
I also think it's weird how when she was first hired just over two months before that night, we hit it off right away. She became my direct boss, but we shared a serious jones for fast cars, of all things. It was a true passion for both of us. She had even fulfilled a lifelong dream of mine to take a racecar driving course and to race semi-pro on the weekends. We spent the entirety of our first meetings together swapping specs about our favourite cars and telling bullshit stories about how fast we'd driven on city streets. At the end of her first day at work, she even let me take her black-on-black Impreza WRX-Sti for a spin. I remember winding those 300 horses up to 190 kph on a ten-block stretch with no lights. Man, what a sweet ride. I remember that I tried to respect her for a bit longer just because of that car. That feeling didn't last long, though.
I had been roped into sitting on her hiring committee so that let me in on her job interview. My first impression of her was that she was a serious tomboy. In fact, she could easily have passed for man at a distance, if not up close. She was short -- maybe five-one -- but she wasn't petite. Nor would I call her stocky, though: it was more in the way she stood, on the balls of her feet with her knees slightly bent and bouncing as though she were prepping for a fight that might break out any second. Through that stance of hers, she managed to convey a certain physical strength.
( the opening continues here... )
I've tried various POVs with this piece, but the first person keeps feeling the most natural to me. I think this is partly due to my motivation for writing this story. Without writing a full-length novel, I want to explore fairly deeply the relationship between the protagonist and his boss. I also want the reader to feel empathy for the protagonist as he feels increasingly compelled to cause serious harm to this boss.
If this opening is effective, you'll want to keep reading to find out what he did that night and to learn more about this woman. Do you? Be honest, now.
In retrospect, I know that I should have acted differently that night. For starters, I shouldn't have stayed late at work to do that "assignment" she gave me. I should have just said to hell with her and just gone home at the end of the workday. At the very least, I should have gone home when I finally did finish her damn assignment so that she couldn't pull me into another argument. Dammit, if she just hadn't started in on me that one last time, I wouldn't be in here now.
God, that woman -- incredible. Incredible! Even now, after 18 months of the drudgery of this place, I can remember every detail of her face and all of our arguments word for word. Every day for the past 18 months, I've gone over in my mind every e-mail, every meeting, and every confrontation I ever had with her. And it's weird, because I've almost developed an awe for her technique. It's definitely something, how quickly she buggered my life into such total hell. It only took her nine weeks! Within nine weeks of her meeting me, she started the complete unravelling of everything that was good in my life.
Thinking back, it's not like she didn't get what she deserved in the end. And still, she barely suffered. Certainly she didn't suffer as much as she made us all suffer. But even so, she sure isn't the one sitting in a 12-by-6 cell for 18 hours a day. No, that would be me.
I also think it's weird how when she was first hired just over two months before that night, we hit it off right away. She became my direct boss, but we shared a serious jones for fast cars, of all things. It was a true passion for both of us. She had even fulfilled a lifelong dream of mine to take a racecar driving course and to race semi-pro on the weekends. We spent the entirety of our first meetings together swapping specs about our favourite cars and telling bullshit stories about how fast we'd driven on city streets. At the end of her first day at work, she even let me take her black-on-black Impreza WRX-Sti for a spin. I remember winding those 300 horses up to 190 kph on a ten-block stretch with no lights. Man, what a sweet ride. I remember that I tried to respect her for a bit longer just because of that car. That feeling didn't last long, though.
I had been roped into sitting on her hiring committee so that let me in on her job interview. My first impression of her was that she was a serious tomboy. In fact, she could easily have passed for man at a distance, if not up close. She was short -- maybe five-one -- but she wasn't petite. Nor would I call her stocky, though: it was more in the way she stood, on the balls of her feet with her knees slightly bent and bouncing as though she were prepping for a fight that might break out any second. Through that stance of hers, she managed to convey a certain physical strength.
( the opening continues here... )
