Submission Lindsay

Name: Lindsay Cummings

Email: lindsaycummings20@yahoo.com

Title and genre: The Murder Complex, YA Dystopian Thriller

Pitch: A girl must survive random assassins in a world where the govt creates pre-determined murders to keep the population down and save resources

250 words:
When I was younger, I used to imagine the sand was made of brown sugar. I’d squish it between my toes, pretending it was one massive spread, stretching for miles and miles along the shoreline, full of sugary sweetness that would make my tongue water. I would pile clusters of it into my mouth, pretending the sweetness was just beneath the grainy surface.

Back then, it was easy to pretend. It was easy to feel like happiness was something tangible, something that could easily fit into the sweaty palm of a child’s fist on a hot summer day.

Now as I pace the ruined beaches of the Shallow alone, watching my little sister dig for seashells along the shoreline, I cannot pretend things are the same. Just as I cannot ignore the feeling of cold steel grasped between my fingertips.

It is the key to survival, the key to life. My father’s old dagger.

“Peri!” I call out over the waves to my little sister. An old beer can bobs up and down in the ocean, mesmerizing me for a moment. But the sun is going down. It isn’t safe anymore. “It’s time to go!”

She holds up a tiny hand and gives me the signal: two stubby little fingers held up high above her head. Is it possible that two fingers can have such attitude?

Two minutes. It’s always two more minutes with her.

The sun is sinking beneath the waves now in the horizon, a massive orange ball of flame melting away into the sea.