Premeditation
Niles Reddick
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We became friends on the yearbook staff in junior high school. In the darkroom, we hid a pack of cigarettes and a pint of vodka by removing a ceiling tile. We smoked and mixed vodka in Sprite while we developed pictures of students and teachers in pans filled with chemicals and pinned them on wires to dry like clothes in our backyards. The attic fan pulled smoke evidence through the roof, and we stumbled out, laughed, and headed to the next class to sleep.
After the end of school bell, we stood at the curb, her waiting on a ride and me keeping her company until I walked home. We listened to a Peter Frampton cassette on her boombox when she said, “I’m gonna kill my dad.” I threw my head back and laughed. I had thought about killing family, too, but usually when I was forced to go to church or directed to perform tasks I hated like raking leaves or scrubbing mildew off baseboards in our clapboard house.
When we returned from our summer vacation at the beach, she was the first person I called, the phone cord stretched from the kitchen to my bedroom. She asked if I’d seen the newspaper. “You might not want to talk to me,” she added.
We hung up and I read the paper. She’d killed her father, shot him in the head in the kitchen. She went to live with an aunt in another state for a while, did a little counseling, and was found not guilty. There were allegations of abuse. They ruled the crime self-defense, spontaneous, and reactionary. I never said a word. There’s no statute of limitations for premeditated murder, but what would be the point forty years later? She never did it again.
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Niles Reddick writes from his home at Cherokee Lake in the Appalachian Mountains and is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over forty anthologies and in more than five hundred pubs including The Saturday Evening Post, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, Citron Review, Midway Journal, and Vestal Review.
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Posted in Vignettes: A Literary Photo Album : JUL '26 and tagged in #CNF, #boudin, #creative nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction