Allow your attention to wander


Joe stumbled as he ran, nearly falling but managing to recover without breaking his stride. He could hear the rhythmic thudding of boots on tarmac behind him, getting louder all the time. They were gaining on him. He swerved into a doorway and crouched down.
Had he been in less of a hurry, Joe might have noticed that this particular doorway was the back door of a struggling Malaysian restaurant, connecting the kitchens to the alleyway he had been running down. The owner of the restaurant, a large, sweaty man with twenty years’ experience in the catering trade, had given a speech to his staff only yesterday about the importance of keeping the back door closed for reasons not only of security but of hygiene – they were due a visit from the inspector this month and just one more infraction could lose him his license.
Of course, this fell on deaf ears for the most part – with the exception of Lee, the head chef, the staff felt no sense of commitment to the restaurant they worked at, seeing it as just another job, just another way to pass their time or pay their rent or, in the case of one of the waiters, deal drugs under his employer’s nose. Lee was another story, though. He was fiercely loyal to the Flaming Dragon – a character trait which would ultimately cost him his marriage and, in an ironic twist of fate, his job.
Joe died, by the way. The alley was a dead end and the guys chasing him caught up with him.

8 comments:

  1. I don't know, dude. Do you ever write badly badly? Nope.

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  2. I would totally read the rest of this book.

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  3. It would have been perfect, had there been no mention of Joe after he hid in the doorway.Knowing what happened to him directly, made it bad. Maybe the cop who busted Lee for drugs after catching him with his wife found Joe's dead body while following a dog that had taken a sock from the homeless man. This homeless man was a vet from the first gulf war, the injury to his leg kept him from walking, but he did meet his ex-wife in the hospital.

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  4. If you narrowed it down to just Two run-on sentences it would be Perfect.

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  5. This is so much like Dickens! Except he did it to good effect, hilariously and beautifully.

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  6. Then it's 2 pages about the guys who were chasing him and then 3 about the second guy's history of cat ownership.

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