Single Prompt Option (drooping branch) - The Weekend Freewrite - 2/19/2023

If it weren’t for that drooping branch, I probably would’ve gotten away with it.

Oh yeah, I know. The perfect crime is a cliché. But I was absofreakinglutety 100% sure that I’d figured all the angles. Six months of planning to kill that rat bastard. Had his routine down cold. He left for the office at 8:33 five days a week. Had lunch at Luigi’s on 5th street. Fettuccine Alfredo every day. How he didn’t weigh 350 is still a mystery, that piece of scum was thin as a rail. Left work at 5:02; you could have set a clock by it. Came home, locked the deadbolt on his front door, ate two bowls of Cheerios, sat reading in that pretentious chair of his that looked like a throne for a third-rate potentate, then upstairs to get ready for bed, and at 9:30 it was lights out.

There’d been a storm earlier that had knocked down some branches and I’d heard that more than a thousand customers on the other side of town had lost power. Didn’t think much about it, and by the time I broke into his house the storm had ended and a thick fog had developed. He always slept with the bedroom window open, and by 9:35 he was snoring like a freight train. The kitchen door had 50-year-old lock that I could have picked in my sleep. I had on a full-body suit, gloves, booties and an N95 mask. Shot into his brain through the left eye with my little .22 revolver. Out the back door and into the fog, adrenaline pumping.

And hit that damn branch with my forehead. At the time, I barely noticed. But one of the detectives later found a bit of blood on it. Little did I know that a cousin I hadn’t seen for years had gotten his DNA tested on a lark. Just to find out how much Neanderthal ancestry he had. And the cops were able to track me down.

So now I know I’m 1.7% Neanderthal.

Written for this challenge, one in a series that @mariannewest has been posting.

Image by Anja from Pixabay

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