... and you just finished dropping the last of the bodies in the landfill. You get back to town and the entire places is yours. Just you. Nobody else. What do you do?
It's funny how stories evolve. I'm revisiting a short story I began a while ago--tentatively titled "Sinner"-- and it used to be that I knew the answer to the question above. This story had an ending, but on re-reading it, it just didn't fit. Long story short: "Sinner" is about a guy, Daryl, who wishes the world would leave him alone. It does. Daryl's the only person on Earth for probably several-hundred years (not that he's bothered to count) and he's going pretty mad. When he begins seeing people, Daryl realizes he has a problem.
How the story originally went was that, after murdering the same (illusory?) man over and over again, he realizes he needs to put back everything he ever broke or moved to get the world back. It's a Herculean task, setting the world right, but it goes by in a few paragraphs. And then, boom, he has his life back.
Way too easy.
So now I've scrapped that ending and I'm trying to find something else for him to do. Feels like he shouldn't have his epiphany so quickly, but I'm not certain where that would come in. I think he's halfway to realizing that he wants people back, but I'm not sure what pushes him the extra step.
Well, at the end of this month I'm going back to my first major edit of "Up in Hell". I've got 21 days to think about it.
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