This follows Emily, a woman who recently suffered from her newborn baby’s death. She takes up running as a coping mechanism, but her husband thinks it’s only a “fetish”. This ends up with a marriage-ending argument, causing Emily to run away to her father’s beach house.
There, she keeps running, befriending some of the residents. One day, she meets Deke, the mechanic for a drawbridge. He tells her about this guy named Pickering, who every summer bring a different “niece” to his house, disappearing for a few months. On the way back from one of her runs, Emily finds Pickering’s house gate ajar, and sees his trunk open. Inside is a blonde woman, one of his “nieces”. There are numerous stab wounds riddling her body. Emily starts to run away, until she gets knocked out.
She wakes up tied to a chair duct taped to the floor inside of Pickering’s house, with him saying that he didn’t plan on killing the blonde, it’s just that she hid a knife in her sock, and promptly starts to beat Emily. He also has a fascination for breasts, too. Kinda weird.
He leaves Emily so he can deal with the corpse, and Emily tries to escape. She uses her leg strength to break the tape, and then bashes heels waist against the corner of his refrigerator in hopes of breaking the chair.

She succeeds right as he gets home, and gets a butcher knife to defend herself. He lunges at her, but she cuts open the skin between two of his fingers, and he clasped to the floor. She begins hitting him with the broken leg of a chair, while he demands that she stops. Eventually she does, and goes to his office and jumps out the window. She runs home, Pickering in hot pursuit. She meets a man on the way, who only speaks Spanish. He was doing garden work, and she tries to explain that Pickering is crazy, but Pickering denies it, and says that Emily’s mentally ill. The man believes it, until he really sees how Emily is acting, and puts her behind him to protect her. Pickering dashes for the shears the man was using, stabs him in the foot, then the chest, then the eye. Emily sees him collapse to the floor, and runs farther away.

She realizes that Pickering is going to catch up with her no matter what, so she does the only thing she can do: run into the ocean. He follows her, and she turns around, grabs him, and holds him to the waves. He screams, dropping the scissors and starts to flail like a toddler having a tantrum. She notices that he has a phobia of water, and begins to laugh at the idea. She carries him deep into the sea, and swims back to shore. He screams for help, and how he can’t swim. Eventually, he stops, and she runs back to her home, feeling the best she had since her kid died.

This is a great short story, especially for one that only takes up about 40 pages. The kid dying part of it seemed a bit unnecessary, but still interesting. Overall, this gets an 8 out of 10. I wish it were longer, and you should definitely read it.

Damn it’s all you

Wdym

Comments

hello person i heard that is sorta a copy of me :)

Huh

you've seen me before right? or not idk

Nope
Wdym

nothin, just heard you are a copy of me, like for example we both like to post our faces

Link to people saying that pretty pwease

from this post imgflip.com/i/8dlp9i

wasn't online during the time btw

Ohhhhhh that thing
Pretty cool that that’s you

Weird, it’s misspelled in the image but not in the description
Anyway it’s obviously supposed to say “comments”