Flash Fiction Friday - Fugitive

"I've got her in custody; keep looking for him." No one stopped a man in uniform, asked to see identification. In the confusion, they were only worried about the male gunman still at large. The two figures, cuffed together, disappeared into the smoke without fanfare.

Later, once he pulled off his false mustache and badge, his un-cuffed hand slipped up between her legs, pressing in. "I was dripping wet the whole time," she moaned. "You know how watching you in disguise gets me wound up." The shackles stayed on; she writhed, but escape was the furthest thing from her mind.

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I'm not in love with this one.  100 more words would have helped.  I know, asking for more words is a sign of weakness; we must be tight, tight, tight.

I edited the hell out of this.  I've given glimpses of my thought process, but today I have very little thought process so instead I'll give a glimpse of my editing process.  Many times I don't need to work quite as hard to make the requirements because it just works out for whatever reason.  But in this instance, I wrote the basic text, then had to go back and add things, which necessitating subtracting things.

I started with opening dialogue, but it was different than the final version.  I cut it halfway through, but had to reintroduce it because some kind of explanation for the first paragraph was lacking.  That meant I had to cut some extraneous material from the second paragraph.  It was sexy but obvious so to the cutting floor it went.  It didn't really serve the story.

I worked through a few iterations of the final line, including "furthest thing from their minds," but ultimately the final version reflects the fact that it's more about her, which looks back to the original conceit that he's a police officer taking her in, rather than a fellow fugitive.  She's not fleeing him, both because he's not really capturing her and because who'd want to flee?

After that, it was mostly adding small touches and constricting verbiage.  I changed "dangerous fugitive" to "male gunman" because I wanted to reinforce the clue that there are two people involved in the manhunt, plus I was planning on using fugitive in the title.  "On the loose" became "at large" because it's a slightly more hard-boiled way of saying it (and I needed that extra word).  I did preserve "without fanfare" from the original version, but most of the other rhetorical flourishes either were cut or heavily altered.

Now that I've revealed how to do the trick, I suppose it's less magical.  My thought process was a little more straight-forward: they don't regularly cuff prisoners together like that (if prisoners are together, it's usually with chains between cuffs) so my mind immediately went to the idea of a policeman falling for his fugitive.  Then I spent a few moments internally giggling, thinking about how amusing the last scene of The Fugitive would have been if Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford had started making out in the back of the car (this didn't really add anything to my process, but it was funny).  Then I wrote it with a bit of a twist because the original idea seemed a little straightforward.  Then editing.  See above.

This has been Flash Fiction Friday.  I have no pimping in me at the moment, so I'll just say that it's a lot of fun even when it's difficult, and there are so few things in life about which I can say that, so you should do it too.  Or, as they say, go ye now and do likewise.