Speed City Sisters in Crime again sponsored the Flash Fiction Contest at the recent Magna Cum Murder, one of the nation's best mystery conferences. The winner was published on this blog earlier. Here is the runner up, an untitled work by Donna Moore.
Flash Fiction Honorable Mention
Untitled Work by Donna Moore
Being a PI in 3000 BC really sucked. Of course, we didn’t call
it 3000 BC – we called it The Year the Woolly Mammoth Ate My Brother. Things
were slow at Stone Investigations. The PI game in prehistoric Britain was as
slow as a Diplodocus with a limp and I was just about to call it a day when the
door opened and in sashayed the local beauty, her buttocks looking like a pair
of baby brontosauri fighting in a sack.
“Mr. Stone,” she purred. “I need your help. It’s my boyfriend,
James.”
I snorted. I knew who she meant, of course. What self-respecting
cavewoman calls her son James? Whistler’s Mother, that’s who.
“What’s he done now?” James Whistler was always getting himself
into trouble with the local cops, graffit-ing the walls of the local caves,
daubing nonsense images of dinosaurs everywhere.
“He’s dead, Mr. Stone. Someone’s murdered him.”
So, ten minutes later, there I was, looking
down at the dead body of James, a sharpened paintbrush thrust into his chest.
On the wall of the cave was a half-finished portrait of the weeping woman
standing next to me. Only, in the portrait, she had this mysterious half smile
on her face. I nodded towards the painting. “You got another admirer, doll?”
She sniffed and nodded. “da Vinci?”
She put a hand to her mouth. “You don’t think Leo would do this,
surely, Mr. Stone. “I’m only his model, not his girlfriend.”
“Mon, Mon, Mona: them artists are always the worst.”
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