byChrisWhite – 2025

London Writers’ Hour Magazine – Flash Fiction Prompt: Killer Idea! 500 words or less; any genre: 3/9/2025. These are just fun exercises to stretch my creativity a bit. You’re given a word or two, the only rule is the word count. I can’t publish these on my site until I know whether I’ve won the contest or not. Once I know the contest status, I get to post them. I hope you enjoy my take on the phrase, “Killer Idea.” Let’s see if you can figure out the backstory on this one.

They found the first body out by the Co-Op, laid out like she’d just lain down for a rest and forgot to get back up. No visible wounds, no struggle. Just dead as Sunday morning.

By the third, the town was alive with small-talk. By the fifth, folks stopped leaving their porch lights off at night.

Sheriff Elizabeth Davis did what she could, patrolled after dark, questioned the homeless, called in a coroner from Nashville who scratched his head and said maybe it was some kinda alien, but what kind, he couldn’t say.

The victims, everyone of ‘em, mothers; all had broken backs.

Then one morning, old Doc Cartwright wandered into the sheriff’s office, set her black bag down on the desk, and said, “I know what’s killing them.”

Sheriff looked up from her barely burnt coffee. “That so?”

Doc nodded, took her time removing her spectacles, wiping ‘em on her sleeve. “Yes’em. And I reckon you do too.”

Sheriff set her cup down. Stared at the Doc. “Go on.”

Doc sighed. “A girl gets told something all her life, she tends to believe it. But that don’t make it true.”

“I was wrong, Sheriff. We all were.”

Sheriff exhaled slow, rubbed at her jaw. “You telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

Doc nodded. “Yes’em. We spent our whole lives calling it old wives’ talk. Said it weren’t real. Said no woman ever died from it, so why worry? But it is real. And they are dying.”

The room got quiet. The old clock on the wall ticked. Finally, the sheriff stood, grabbed her hat, and said, “Show me.”

The two very unconventional partners rode out to the Caldwell place, Nextdoor to the Sheriff’s own home. Sheriff wasn’t sure why, it just seemed fitting, seeing as Bertha Caldwell, retired mother of three, had been the first to go.

The house stood like it always had, just a little lonelier now, with the lace curtains drawn and the dust settled thick on the porch swing.

Doc knelt in the yard, ran her hand over the grass, then pointed. “There.”

Sheriff squinted. “I don’t see nothing.”

Doc sighed. “Look closer.”

So she did. And then she stepped back, a cold dread working its way up her spine as she noticed her own daughter, Lil’ Tarpley Davis from nextdoor, play’n hopscotch near it.

There, plain as day, was a crack in the ground.

Not wide. Not deep. Just a sliver of earth, barely enough to slip a blade of grass through.

But it was there.

And it was growing.

Sheriff swallowed. “Why, I be damned.”

Doc just nodded.

All her life, she’d heard it, some folks were just unlucky, they’d step on a crack and never be seen breathing again. Just die, right then and there. That’s how the wives tale started. ‘Cept, turns out, it weren’t no wives tale.

And the ones who didn’t? Well, maybe they were lucky. Maybe it just took a little longer.

Tarpley skipped nearer towards the crack.

But now she knew. The Sheriff politely stopped her daughter from getting nearer the crack.

It wasn’t luck.

It was patience.

And the cracks were finally collecting their due.