Short Story - Eternity/Blackness, Pt. 1

This next short story was my Fall semester final for my creative writing class and, like The Others, started as a script that I wrote for theatre called "Eternity." So, today I will go over "Eternity" before I get to the actual short story.

Warning: brief mentions of firearms, misogyny, animal cruelty, child abuse, and death are in this summary

"Eternity" followed young FBI agent Mariah Kent with her controlling and misogynistic boss Philip Drummer. One day, a woman named Julie Lawson reports her boyfriend Shawn O'Leary missing to the FBI. Julie mentions that she believes Shawn had been cheating on her, so when he first went missing, she didn't suspect anything, but then she received a mysterious threat on a tape recording that told her not to report it due to Shawn messing with "the Aeter" and that "the Heart" will be returned to where it belongs, but Julie still decided to report it.

Despite the fact that Drummer made Mariah talk to Julie, he insists that she's too inexperienced to work on the case, but after she snaps at him, he compromises by allowing her to work with a more experienced agent, Ben Adams.

When Mariah and Ben reach the site of Shawn O'Leary's car, they tell the police to step aside, as this is now their case. They find a receipt for a place called Kai's Jewelry Shop, and then inform Julie that Shawn has purchased an engagement ring for her.

Mariah and Ben go to Kai's Jewelry Shop, and Kai gives the descriptions of four suspicious-looking people in hoodies that were at the shop, as well as a license plate that had the day's date on it. They suspect something is going down today and that Shawn O'Leary is a part of it, but Drummer tells them not to follow up on it. Mariah soon figures out that Drummer's voice pattern matches that on the recording Julie got and his physical description matches one of the mysterious men Kai saw. Conveniently, Ben never trusted Drummer and put a tracker on his car years ago, and they follow him to a warehouse in Queens.

Inside the warehouse are four people who match Kai's descriptions, one of which is Drummer, another which is Mariah's father, Jacob Kent. The other man there is holding a ring with a large diamond--the engagement ring Shawn O'Leary had bought--which was "the Heart" in the message. The other man uses the Heart to knock out Mariah, and she gets a vision of a cat.

FIRST OF ALL: this stupid cat was part of the prompt that I was forced to include as a prompt for my script for theatre. I wanted Mariah to talk to her dead mother. But whatever it had to be this cat.

Anyways, this cat was just a figment of Mariah's imagination because it was a stray that Mariah tried to take in as a kid, but her dad killed it. The cat tells her that "The Eternal Heart" grants power to its wearer, and if held in the light of the full moon, they become immortal. Jacob Kent was recruited a decade ago to "the Aeter," an organization that wants to use the Heart for evil, when Mariah was 13, and her father was arrested the same year. The Aeter broke Jacob Kent out of prison and used the Heart to make an illusion that he was still in his cell. But the Heart was lost a few years prior, and Shawn O'Leary ended up finding it.

Mariah then goes into a rant about how her father was abusive, and that when she was 13 he was arrested for shooting and killing her mother. She'd grabbed the gun and shot him in the shoulder in defense before he was arrested. It was then she wanted to stop criminals like him.

When Mariah awakes, she sees her father shoot the other man--who was the leader of the Aeter--and grabs the Heart, ready to hold it up to the light of the full moon and gain immortality. Before he does though, Mariah shoots him in the head.

Mariah and Ben search the warehouse and find Shawn O'Leary tied up, and then they bring him home to Julie, to which he proposes on the spot.

I think the biggest weakness of this draft was the time limit I had. I couldn't develop anything to where I wanted it to be. I liked Mariah and Ben's dynamic. Mariah was determined and hardened due to her childhood, while Ben was more carefree and stable, with a wife. Drummer being a member of the Aeter was rushed, and I had to get Mariah and Ben to the climax, so Ben already having tracked his car was an unfortunate deus ex machina to get them there in time to finish the story. I also didn't clarify what was so important about the specific date, since the full moon happens at least once a month, which I could have done with more development.

Overall, I definitely want to get back to this. Maybe a fully developed short story or a novella would be best. Maybe even an anthology with these two.

Regardless, I don't want to abandon this idea, and it's a decent first draft.

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