The following is the first draft of a short story for a collection I am working on. I hope you enjoy it. Cheers! --Patrick On the morning of my first kill, I woke up before Mom had come to get me. I gazed up at the concrete ceiling, where the night before, Dad helped me array a night’s sky of glow-in-the-dark stickers. A cool breeze wafted through the cracked-open window, carrying with it the hum of the slumbering city. In that predawn darkness, I pondered what Roddy had told the other boys on the bus the week before. “...and its chest just exploded,” he yelled, arms hooked over the back of...









