Inspiration sprang from my box today in the form of two rusty nails, which reminded me of one of the things my mother warned me about when I was a kid. Don’t go out barefoot or you’ll step on a rusty nail and then you’ll get lockjaw! I thought that was a really funny threat until I read a coming of age book set at the turn of the century or thereabouts, when young ladies wore bloomers and dresses and tied their hair back with ribbons, and, according to this book, planned their nuptials at the tender age of 14. The main character’s love—a feisty and loyal young man with raven hair—was thrown from a carriage and cut himself on the wagon wheel. And then died a gruesome, slow-motion death owing to, yes, lockjaw. She held his grotesquely grinning face to her budding breast and sobbed the same tears I silently shed under my bedcovers around 2:00 in the morning with my father’s filched mini-flashlight. How would our heroine ever know love again? Oh. Too, too cruel.
Working Title: Sharp Edges
1st Sentence: For a very long string of days, weeks, months, years, I didn’t care if I might step on a rusty nail because I went outside barefoot, if I should avoid the tall grass because of snakes, if the river was too polluted and mucky for wading, if a boy blocked my way at school—I had plenty of kick in both feet—if a girl didn’t want to be my friend.
Favorite Sentence: I was a little rabbit, twitchy and bright-eyed and hiding a soft underbelly.
Word Length: 1,394
Daily Shorty 
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