#34

Nolan Hendricks III was a rising star. Everyone said so.

Born and raised in America’s heartland, he had the good breeding of John Kennedy, the charm of Bill Clinton, and the grass-roots political savvy of Barack Obama.

Hendricks raised $300,000 in the first few days of his campaign, mostly from small donors. He appealed to a broad cross-section of America, from the liberal-leaning cities on both coasts to the vast, empty breadbasket in between.

We all knew this would make Hendricks the man to beat in Iowa. What we didn’t realize, or maybe realized too late, was that it also painted a big red target on his back.

“Uh oh. We have a problem.” Charlie was sitting on the creaky third-hand couch in the corner of Hendricks for America headquarters, staring at his laptop screen.

I slurped up the rest of my lo mein and pointed at him with my chopsticks. “What problem? Do I want to know?”

“You definitely do not want to know,” Charlie replied.


About Prompt-A-Day: The rules are simple. Every day, I generate a promptĀ using Story Shack’s awesome writing prompt generator. Then I set a timer for one hour. At the end of the hour, I post what I’ve got. Sometimes it’s decent. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes I fail at the prompt. Sometimes I do okay. I do not edit, unless I find a typo, because I can’t help fixing those. Feel free to join in and post a link to your writing in the comments.

Similar Posts

  • #14

    The weather gets to everybody eventually. The weather and the isolation. And the same five faces staring at you over your corn flakes every damn day. Winters in Antarctica are no joke. We get three hours of sunlight a day, and the temperature routinely dips below -40. Even though there are a few hundred people…

  • #13

    Dennis leaned against the back wall of the restaurant, smoking a Camel and enjoying one of the last cool nights of spring. “The heat’s coming,” Javier had said, just before stepping inside to confront the mound of dirty dishes that had appeared, as if by magic, at his station. Now Dennis was alone, and the…

  • #29

    When I was little I used to go crazy whenever the doorbell rang. I was just a young kid with a lot of pent up energy who thought he knew everything. Maybe there was a time you felt that way too? In the beginning, my pack seemed to like it when I barked and growled…

  • #18

    “Auntie! Please let me down!” In the hours Aunt Beatrice left her there, one of the tethers that held Carolyn to the floor had come loose. Well, to be honest, she’d loosened it. At the time, she thought if she could just get free of the tethers, the magic would be broken and she’d float…

  • #30

    Turnout was not as big as expected at the “Something Old, Something New” wedding flea market at the Baltimore Convention Center. This was due, in no small part, to the surprise late-winter snowstorm that had blanketed the city just a few days before. It wasn’t a blizzard – Baltimore gets its fair share of those…

  • #7

    The last time Jax saw his mother, it was the middle of the night. Well, to say he “saw” her isn’t exactly true. It was very dark and she didn’t turn on the light. It would be more accurate to say Jax felt her. He felt her weight on the mattress. He felt her hand…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *