The Mysterious Demise of Janice and Fredrick

I was just taking a walk down computer memory lane when I came across this bad short story I wrote for a class last summer. The assignment was to write a one-page story that included as many of the elements of bad storytelling as possible. The idea was to get bad storytelling out of our system. I don't know if it worked, but I do think I fulfilled the assignment.

And thus it begins:

“Goodbye,” Winston said to Janice and Fredrick, with a hint of that real sadness people have in their voice when they say goodbye to their close friends. “I will call you when I get to the airport in Boise.”

"Bye old friend,” replied Fredrick.

“Have a great trip. Fly safe,” came the reply from Janice.

“Ha, tell that to the pilot,” Winston joked back. With a surprisingly firm grasp for a man who would be 70 in three more days, Winston took hold of his clumsy hard-shelled suitcase. Patches of red showed through on its heavily scratched surface between the masses of stickers the bag had acquired from hundreds of trips through customs. His wife, Tabitha, an aging tennis athlete, had offered to replace the bag on several occasions. “It’s so tacky,” she would say. But Winston loved the bag and would never allow it to be replaced.

Now holding the bag, Winston used his other hand to search his inside coat pocket. Sure enough, he had remembered to bring his boarding pass. Thank God for online check in, thought Winston. My, how technology had developed in his lifetime.

Winston stepped over a little mound of cigarette butts and headed toward the airport. A large set of glass double doors slid open as he approached, he entered, and with that, he was gone.

“Do you think that we will ever see him again?” Janice asked Fredrick.

“You know perfectly well that we will not,” Fredrick retorted.

Oh yeah, Janice remembered. Today was the day that she and Fredrick were going to drive off of the edge of the Snake River canyon in a fiery blaze of death.

What a silly person Janice is for forgetting, Fredrick said to himself.

No one knows if Janice and Fredrick ever made it to that cliff or not. No wreckage was ever found, but some say that it was washed away in the powerful current and carried to the Gulf. Others say that they changed their mind and tried facing up to their financial struggles like adults, but either way they were never heard from again, which led Chief Smith to suspect that the mafia was involved.