Episode 3 of Death Of 1000 Cuts is now up! Please share, give me feedback, send me your writing extracts and, most importantly, enjoy. The update schedule may sometimes be a bit wonky, but I’d rather sometimes miss a week and keep going than hold myself to rigorous standards which I immediately fail to live up to. Hope that’s okay avec toi.

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Here’s the piece I talk about this week. If you’d like to submit, please read the submission guidelines. You can get in touch via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right.

Sniper

Time slowed to a crawl. Will, following some primal instinct that had saved his ass five, six, now seven times moved to the left; the bullet cut a path through the space where his head had been and struck the skeleton of a bus, some twenty yards back. A deafening clang came to his ears, but no gunshot, was the gun silenced or was it just the wind? He couldn’t tell. And shortly after the first shot, his guardian angel sixth sense pretty much left him for dead because the second one entered through his right breast, shattered his rib, and dug a path through flesh and lung before exiting out the back, white-hot, and throwing him to the ground with the force of a sledgehammer.

He hit the asphalt and everything sped back up.

While he reeled, Sarah grabbed his collar and began to pull. She had her rifle in one hand and was dragging Will toward the bus with the other, yelling where did it come from, Will? What direction? as a third shot hit the pavement at Will’s feet. He coughed and tasted blood, acrid and metallic; looking down at his shirt he saw a growing blot of crimson and thought how exactly did I go so long without being shot? while Sarah frantically dragged and said oh shit, oh shit, oh shit–he hoped they had taught her how to treat sucking chest wounds in medical school.