For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 30: Madame Denaris did not like the parental audience during class and so many of the mothers went to the café across the street during lessons while others used the time to run errands.
Madame Denaris did not like the parental audience during class and so many of the mothers went to the café across the street during lessons while others used the time to run errands. The class started at two. Penelope closed her eyes. They were working on their grand performance. Their end of class presentation where they would get to dance on a real stage in front of a real audience in real costumes.
She worked really hard on her part, staying late in class and working on her steps after class and in the mornings. She wanted to do really well. Both of her parents promised they would be there and she wanted to perform perfectly for them.
Penelope remembered being excited at the prospect and terrified of not doing well. ‘Classes were longer as we got closer to the performance,’ she remembered. It was one of the longer classes that day. ‘So she would have had time to get to the estate and back during the class if she didn’t stay long.’
She wondered if her mother was picking something up at the estate. She looked down at the page of black and white text and realized she didn’t know enough about her mother or the estate to even guess why she might be going out there. She remembered her mother not returning to pick her up and then the nice policewoman sent to escort her from the ballet class home. She never went back. Never had the chance to perform with the rest of the class.
Taking a deep breath, Penelope turned the top page over. There were photos. They weren’t originals, but scans printed out of pages. They had a high resolution and parts were circled. The circled bits were then blown up and shown in a larger scale so details were more visible. To Penelope’s relief the pictures were of the car, not her mother. There was some blood, but it was mostly mechanical.
She looked at the mangled mess of machine and then studied the circled bit that was enlarged. There was a reference number typed next to the photo. Not knowing anything about cars and their inner workings, she flipped the page and found the text that went with the reference number. The sentence was short and hit like a punch to the gut.
“Brake line deliberately cut.”
She read the sentence twice feeling hot and cold flashing over her body like strobe lights. She clipped back to the photo and studied the enlarged circle. The photo showed a mangled mess of machinery, but even she could see there was one straight cut across some sort of tube like thing she guessed to be the brake line. It didn’t look like the rest. It was cut rather than mangled.
Penelope swallowed hard and turned the page, eager for more information. And it was there. A close up of the cut brake line, there were minute particles of an organic matter as though someone used a knife or scissors that was routinely used somewhere else. Given the nature of the organic matter the laboratory speculated its primary use was in a kitchen. There was a tiny, nearly microscopic nick in the blade and it created a distinctive pattern. It was small though and the lab warned that one quick sharpening would remove the tiny indentation so it was less an identifying mark than was wanted. Penelope studied the image of the cut brake line.
Ten til Midnight 