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NOT a Funny Story. Read "A Cockroach in Brooklyn" Below Instead

This is NOT a funny story. Do not read.  Seriously. This post will be boring (unless you know me maybe, like, if you are my mum)  Skip to the next post, or any of the others - those are my very funny short stories. "A Cockroach in Brooklyn" (https://sophieannas.blogspot.com/2009/06/cockroach-part-deux.html) is possibly my best short story ever. Seriously. It's very undiscovered. It's not that undiscovered. 94 people have read it, I see that from the analytics of Blogger.  Maybe 90 of those were me editing it. I have 4 people in my immediate family.  So it is, it's undiscovered. Go ahead, you can discover it. But don't read the rest of this. Really. Stop here.

Bye.

From Loss comes Gain. From a Victim emerges a Protagonist. From the ashes of burned life morphs a...movie!

Leah is a pastor's daughter in a sparsely-populated desert town in California's San Bernardino County. She plans to follow in his footsteps, and attends college to study Christianity. But, like her father, Leah has a violent temper. One day, she agrees to babysit a neighbor's child. When the child's behavior infuriates her, she lashes out and abuses the child.  She lies to the parents, knowing that the child does not have the language skills to tell what really happened. Later, she learns that the child has been diagnosed with autism, which was obviously the cause of his behavior.  Her guilt about this incident bothers her.  She cannot forget how she treated the child.   She uses lies to manoever herself out of trouble.  But in a small town, this catches up with her. She wears out friendships and burns bridges.  Finally, she is charged with a criminal offense.

Changing her identity, she makes a fresh start in Florida with her husband and positions herself as a former teacher looking for work with special needs children and their families. She is certain that a career helping children just like the one she hurt years earlier is a way to ease her conscience. However, she is overwhelmed by the culture shock of living in a far more culturally diverse community than she was used to. With her past still picking at her conscience, her pathology begins to unravel.

Leah is hired by a loving family of four with a special needs child, who gratefully accept her into their family fold. Driven by a strict morality from her isolated and religious upbringing, she begins to pick holes in the fun-loving family that hired her.  She manages to hide her increasing antagonism from her unsuspecting employers, and gains their trust. But her pathology can only lay dormant for so long...

One day, Leah senses that the past she tried to escape from is hunting her down. Her job seems less stable as the parents of the new family begin to see her true colors.  One day, she makes a terrible mistake - her psychotic temper gets the better of her once again. In a bid to protect herself, she weaves a web of lies to the family and to police in order to cover the tracks of her terrorism. She purposefully implicates the innocent family - before they realize the full truth about her.  As the mother seeks her strength amidst the ashes left behind by Leah, she begins to gather evidence against Leah. Will Leah succeed in saving herself again, leaving more chaos in her wake, or will she finally meet her match and the truth of her past catch up to her?

OK, enough of my movie synopsis...back to the funnier posts...

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