Feeling fab thanks to the fury of furious fiction

I just found out I made the long list of authors for Australian Writers' Center Furious Fiction competition for January this year (https://www.writerscentre.com.au/furious-fiction/). Where I can share my Reedsy stories easily unfortunately no so with the monthly comp. So for all your enjoyments please find below my long listed effort...

The Devil’s Dress was Emerald Green

Robert Stevens met the girl 10 days after he’d lost his job. He had been an accountant for well over a decade at the firm and it had come as a shock when they said that they had to let him go. Thus it had seemed like serendipity at first, Irish luck or a wish come true when she entered the bar he had gone to with the purpose of drowning his sorrows. She wore his favourite colour and her flaming red hair had instantly caught his attention. She sat down next to him even though there had been many tables vacant at that time of the day.

“Are you Robert Stevens?” she had asked him, her voice sweet, friendly.

He was 9 beers down already by then so he didn’t trust his voice not to slur. He had nodded instead in reply to her question. He had 8 bucks left in his pocket and nothing in the bank so he was eager as could be to hear her offer. There were 7 pages to the contract she placed before him then and the further down the pages he went the finer the print seemed to get. Regardless it only took him 6 seconds to say yes. 5 droplets of his blood were smeared at the bottom of the final page. He had thought to himself when the door closes you just have to open a window.

“Feels like I’m signing my life away,” he laughed as his finger traced his signature from the crimson drops.

“You’re doing more than that,” she replied with a gorgeous smile.

It took him 4 attempts gather up enough courage to enter the bank she had specified when she had promised him riches beyond his wildest dreams. When he stepped back out on the street again his arms were full of cash, a smoking gun was in his hand and there were 3 bodies left in his wake. The first had been an off duty cop, then a mother of three and finally a beloved local school teacher.

Only 2 of the major news channels covered the story as the manhunt for him began. For only a few days he was on the run. By the end he had spent at least half the dough sneaking across the country. They found him holed up somewhere near the border to Mexico. He was there waiting with his girl at his side. The last thing he heard before the bullets began to fly was her 1 little secret. She was the Devil and his heart and soul both belonged to her.