Everybody’s gotta start somewhere—and sometimes it’s fun to celebrate how hard you’ve come. Fellow crusaders Sierra Gardner and Clarissa Draper and I have concocted a sensationally bad beginning to a mystery, making as many newbie mistakes as possible. Sierra is soliciting comments on what we did wrong in the passage—but I’d like to hear how we could make it worse!

It was a dark and stormy night. The spiders were advancing up the drive, ready to attack. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. One eight-legged creature began to crawl up her leg and shake its pincher’s at her face. No, she said in a silent scream. The spider continued to advance, closer and closer to her face. Just as the spider was about to bite into her neck, an alarm sounded. Sandra awoke with a start and lay in bed and listened to her alarm clock ring.

Her phone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me. How are you?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. What did you do today?’

‘I don’t want to talk about that right now, I want you to come over, it’s important, Sandra. I fear for my life and I have some important stuff to tell you.’

‘Okay, I will be there soon.’

As Sandra walked drearily up the sidewalk to the white picket fence colonial with blue shutters and budding daffodils in front, she noticed with surprise that the door hung slightly ajar. Immediately alarmed, Sandra crept forward, her legs stalking forward gracefully like a leopard moving stealthily toward it’s prey.

Whoever broke into the house wouldn’t know this, but Sandra had been teaching martial arts for years. Her father had insisted that no daughter of his would go out into this scary world unprepared to defend herself. Over the years her training had paid off, keeping her safe when her job as a police officer put her in harms way. Yes, Sandra was confident. She was more than a match for any drug crazed young punk who thought he could make a quick buck by nabbing her HD television and pawning it at the local dive down the street.

Sandra barels through the door with a flying high kick with her foot. A movement in the pitch-black dark startles her and she falls down. I jump to my feat and call out. Nobody answers, so I jump on the moving lump.

“Ouch! Sandra, it’s me your father!” “My father?” I slid to the floor. “What are you doing here from Baltimore?”

I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him except when he was trying to get me to test for my third dan for my blackbelt but I didnt want to because I was only fourteen and I hated how much martial arts was taking over my life. Even though now I’m pretty glad I did it because it did help a lot, but I didn’t know that then and dad didnt even try to listen to me. “Sandra, you’ll thank me one day,” he kept saying, but the instructor didn’t agree even after I’d broken his nose, though I didn’t mean to he just got in the way. I told him to be more careful even then I didn’t know my own strength so dad was lucky i didn’t hurt him worse even though he had fifty pounds on me.

“Dad, what happened to you? Is everything okay? Why are you on the floor in a lump?” Sandra said with worry ringing through her voice with clarion clearness.

“You missed him Sandra. He took everything, including….”

With a dramatic gasp her father took his final breath, his head falling backward and his tongue lolling out grotesquelly. Only then did Sandra see the pool of blood, the red life fluid seeping from his body onto the expensive italian tile.

It was tough to write this—but at the same time, it was nice to realize how far I’ve come (even though I have a ways to go yet!).

What do you think? How could this get even worse?