Excerpt from Pretty Debris

JACKIE: No smoke alarms. No fire extinguisher.

SHANNON: No phone?

JACKIE: Nothing.

JENNY: It’s perfect, right?

JACKIE: Carbon monoxide can kill you in one minute.

SHANNON: Kills you? Outright? Just kills you?

(Lights to full.)

JACKIE: You go unconscious first. Then your heart stops beating. And your brain stops working. Everything shuts down.

SHANNON: But you don’t feel no pain?

JACKIE: There’s pain. There’s choking and wheezing. Plenty of pain.

SHANNON: There’s gotta’ be enough pain.

JENNY: How about poison?

JACKIE: Carbon monoxide is poison.

JENNY: Not liquid poison. We could put it in his beer or something.

SHANNON: What the hell do you know about liquid poison? I can’t name one Goddamn liquid poison, can you?

JACKIE: This is gonna’ be tough enough. We gotta’ stick to what we know. We know fire.

JENNY: You know fire.

JACKIE: I know fire. I know drowning too. You wanna’ drown this bastard? Tie his hands together and weigh his foot down with a cinder block?

SHANNON: Drowning.

JENNY: It’s slow.

SHANNON: It’s not violent though. It’s not torture.

JENNY: What do you want to do, Shannon? Scissor him up? Cut out his eyes? Slit his throat?

SHANNON: Yes. Yes. Yes.

JACKIE: Let’s not get stupid here. Let’s not talk stupid. We gotta’ kill him and not get caught.

SHANNON: Destroy. I want to destroy him.

JACKIE: A fire will do it. He’ll die and so will his house.