What If…

Have you ever noticed how some songs get in your head and refuse to leave? Right now, for me that’s the song What If from Coldplay. It’s also the premise behind The Killer Trail. 

What if you found a cell phone on a snow covered trail and decided to return the phone to its owner? That happened to me a few years back when I was running on a local trail. While I continued my run and deliberated on how to get it back to its owner, I let my imagination take over with the following chilling scenario.

What if that cell phone belonged to a killer, determined to get his phone back and eliminating any association with the person who discovered the phone? I’d like to think I had my feet firmly planted in reality, but allowing my mind to wander certainly made for an entertaining run that day!  

I like to lose myself when I am running and this is usually accomplished by listening to music. On other occasions, I let my mind drift off into the world of fiction. As a result, on subsequent runs on that trail, I returned to my fictional story about the cell phone and added new twists and turns. Eventually it got to the point where I didn’t restrict my fictional story to my trail running. Instead, I decided to have some fun with it by putting pen to paper, and in this case, finger to keyboard, under the working title The Killer Trail. 

PS: If you are wondering what actually happened to the cell phone I found, the resolution was far less dramatic. I dialed a few numbers until I reached the owner and told him I’d leave the phone for him to pick up at a nearby Starbuck’s. Was he a killer? The truth is, we’ll never know. I didn’t stick around. But, what if…