Colt Dragoon | WeWriWa

Happy Sunday y’all! Thank you for participating in the Weekend Writing Warriors snippet, a blog hop where writers showcase their work in 10 sentences or less.

The following snippet is from a short story challenge I did with my friend Renee over at DuelingLibrarians.net. This challenge was a western genre challenge. Instead of dumping you into the middle of the action, something I am prone to do with varying rates of success, I have decided to give you the opening paragraphs of Colt Dragoon.

I was only eight years old when I came face to face with my destiny. Not too many people can say that. Most folks I’ve met wander through life looking for that special something that will bring meaning to their existence. I met mine on a hot, dusty day while wrangling eggs from a coop that didn’t belong to me.

It had been three days since my last real meal. My daddy was in another one of his drunken stupors, bringing to an end a week-long bender, a personal best. His unconscious body lie in the corner of our one room shack designated as the kitchen. He smelled of urine, vomit, and desperation, a smell that would forever be imprinted on my memory, and one I would run into over and over again. I sat, cross-legged on a wooden plank wrapped in a burlap sack, stuffed with straw that served as my bed, watching the rise and fall of my daddy’s chest. Finally, the emptiness of my stomach overruled the hopeless feeling I had about the situation, and I resigned myself to finding food at one of the neighboring homesteads.