The Lucky 7 Meme

J. W. Alden has tagged me to take part in the Lucky 7 Meme. If not familiar with the meme, the rules are:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines - sentences or paragraphs - and post them as they're written. No cheating
4. Tag 7 authors
5. Let them know

I don't have enough pages to go down to 77, so I picked a page and went down to line 7, picked the first paragraph and copied 7 paragraphs since they are relatively short.

Lethal Injection

I’d run from my room down the hall to greet him, latching onto his leg, my head barely reached his belt with the secured holster and gun. He would pick me up into the air and twirl me around, "That's my boy!"

I was too young to understand when they put him on administrative leave. Mom just said money would be tight and Santa wouldn’t bring as many toys that year. Then the day came when there were other uniformed officers in the house. They put dad in handcuffs before walking him out.

“Let him go!” I cried out while mom held me back. I wanted to charge at them all, beat them with my fists. “You can’t do that, he’s the boss of the whole town!”

It was strange, you know? Because he was the big man and they took him away. I thought maybe someone else wanted to be the boss. If I knew the word for it back then, ousted is what I would have called it. Mom and I didn’t talk about it, ever. She just cried a lot. We even moved to another county when she was strong enough on her own, then to another state.

A few years later when I turned eight, we visited dad in prison. He was in a tan jumpsuit. His eyes were puffed and bruised and the glass wall between us reminded me of lines drawn in the sand on the beach not too long ago, dad daring me to cross over, teasing me. Mom handed me the phone and it was weird talking to him like that when he was right there in front of me.

“What happened to your face?” I asked. I would have called him dad but he didn’t look the same. He lost a lot of weight and he wasn’t larger than life, not like I remembered.

He said he had been lifting weights and dropped them. It was an accident. He looked sad, but I knew he would be okay because he was strong. I cried when we left him there to go back to Kansas. That’s where we lived, down the road from Grandma.

***

And, now I'm tagging 7 more unsuspecting writers!

Nicole Pyles
Ashley Chappell
Kimber Vale
Hillary Jacques
Lena Winfrey Seder
Kelly Hashway
Mysti Parker