Tang Story 6

She sat in front of the monitor, chewing her lips, ignoring the sounds of voices and banging doors that drifted up from downstairs, ignoring likewise the perilously overbalancing piles of papers on her desk, struggling for an idea that wasn’t hopelessly obvious. It wasn’t so much that dishonesty or twistedness were foreign to her nature as that she couldn’t hide them effectively. A prisoner who was actually a chrysalis...an interview with an editor made to sound like a criminal trial—painfully obvious, and she didn’t think she could execute them anyway. Not with some of the other devious minds who would shortly be digesting them.

The light slid slowly across the room, fingering the pile of clothes on the chair and the pile of books on the bed, covering the abortive beginnings on her screen with a pale wash of obscuring light, a blank void containing no twists at all...

No twists at all. The thought stiffened her spine. That was, perhaps, the last possible surprise in a twist-endings competition. Let them search frantically for double meanings and hidden significances in a paragraph or three of plain narrative.

--Joanna Hoyt