They were at the hole with post-earthquake highway, and Erika stood on the higher level, and tapped the ball lightly with her club. You had to hit it just so, and it would jump, and then ricochet off the upturned dump truck, and then the wall of the fault where the highway dropped what would be fifteen or twenty feet if this were all to scale, and then caromed gently into the hole.
That one was more like shooting pool than like miniature golf, and it had been her favorite. Her mom had shown her the trick. She’d shushed the family friend who’d hinted that she had been a great pool player when she was young.
Nothing was ever spoken in front of Erika about before.
Six Sentence Sunday excerpts in June come from the most recent draft of Erika and the Vampire, currently being revised for release in July 2012.
E. P. Beaumont 
I so love how you write and weave in the detail with a perfect pace. Great six!
hell of a min golf course and i can’t play pool either. But the last line says it all. Riddle: how many drafts does it take to make a book?
To answer the riddle: it depends on how you define a draft (I usually do one pass through for each technical issue: scene structure, description vs action, dialogue, etc.). If you are Virginia Woolf and your book is The Years the answer is fourteen.
That golf course sounds really HARD! I like the hint of a suppressed backstory.
Intriguing 6! and one hell of a miniature golf hole!
The miniature golf course in this story is based on a real one created in Chicago in the early 1990s (Google “Par Excellence miniature golf,” though regrettably none of the results have images). I filtered it through memory and relocated it to Minneapolis.
More proof that even the oddest bits and pieces will find a place, and that real life is our best source for the truly striking.
That is a great last line. And what an interesting world.
what an interesting world you’ve built!!!
As usual, your work is woven with an attention to detail and craft that’s seriously humbling. Which is why I nominated you for a blogger award: http://jmblackmanwriting.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/beautiful-blogger/
Very nicely crafted excerpt, EP.