Theodore Jerome Cohen is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Black Friday
by Theodore Jerome Cohen
“And that’s the last time you saw your wife?”
“Yep, two years ago, around 5 in the morning on Black Friday. Monique got up, dressed, and left, saying she was going to the shopping center on the west side of town to pick up some last-minute Christmas gifts for little John and the twins.
“Jesus! What didja do?”
“Well, at first, nothing. She did the same thing last year. So, I got up around 6 or so, changed little John and gave him a bottle, then gave the girls their breakfasts.
“When Monique hadn’t returned by 10, I started to get worried. She wasn’t answering her cell phone, so I got the gal from next door—she was 13 at the time—to come over and sit the kids while I drove to the shopping center to look for her. Found her car in front of the department store she mentioned on her way out the door, but she was nowhere to be found. I did see some of her friends, though, but they hadn’t seen her either.
“When she hadn’t returned home by 7 that evening, I filed a missing persons report with the police. Came to find out the following Monday that her boss’s wife had done the same for her husband.
“The real kicker came a few days later when more than $1.7 million was found to be missing from the escrow account of the commercial real estate company where both Monique and her boss worked.”
Hooray! Congratulations, Ted.