HCC: High Concept Challenge # 59: The Last Word

[Tom Russell]

Mickey Spillane once singled out "Vengeance is Mine" as his favorite of his own novels, because of its twist ending, which really came right at the end-- the last word of the last sentence-- and gave a new context to everything that happened before it.*

Your challenge is to write a story-- of any length, genre, tone-- in which everything hinges on, builds up to, or is changed by the very last word of the very last sentence. Is it a twist? A terrible pun? Something sweet? Something awesome? Completely up to you, chums.

Let's say--- March 31?

[* - Like most of Spillane's work, it's not really very /good/, and the ending is particularly ugly, and in a quite literal sense, violently and fatally hetero-normative. But I suppose some allowances should be made for the context in which the thing was written, as one doesn't expect to find a sympathetic or enlightened view of people who aren't white, male, and straight in a tough-guy potboiler published in 1950.]