Grandma’s Advice
By DL Winchester / October 4, 2026 / No Comments / Uncategorized
Earlier tonight, a fellow author made a post suggesting a Law and Order: SVU storyline revolving around the Cornell 7. Something in my brain clicked, and I was like, “Wait, I wrote something like that…” So I went digging through the archives, and found it in my first flash fiction collection, A Terrible Place and Other Flashes of Darkness (Undertaker Books, 2024). So here it is in all its glory, “Grandma’s Advice.”
Eighty thousand fans roared as the Tigers ran into the stadium, led by orange-and-black-clad cheerleaders as the marching band thundered the school’s fight song. When they reached the sideline, the cheers turned to boos as their rivals, the Falcons, ran onto the opposite end of the field.
“You ready?” Dane Kelly, the Tigers’ offensive coordinator, asked his quarterback.
“Yeah.” Grabbing a ball off the bench, Vic Hoffman faked a throw into the stands, earning cheers from a group of girls sitting a few rows up.
“Not still thinking about that girl, are you?”
Hoffman sighed. “Look, it was consensual. She just hates athletes, and when she found out I was on the football team, she made up a story saying she was raped.”
Kelly held up his hands. “I ain’t accusing you, buddy. I believe you.”
“Good, ‘cuz a lot of folks don’t.”
He clapped Hoffman on his shoulder pads. “Those folks don’t matter right now. Just go out there and play the game.”
The Falcons got the ball first and went three-and-out, punting the ball to the Tigers. Hoffman trotted onto the field.
“Red 33 Flag Sweep,” he told the other players when he reached the huddle. With a clap of their hands, they broke to their positions, Hoffman taking his behind the center.
Looking left and right to make sure his team was in position, he got ready to take the ball. “Down! Set!” he yelled, checking the defense for surprise changes.
Blue eyes stared back at him. The defensive lineman’s head was gone, replaced by a blonde young woman’s.
“Why did you rape me, Vic?”
“I didn’t!”
The ball was jammed into his hands as the center charged forward. Vic managed to corral it, turning to see the fullback rushing to take the handoff. Vic blinked for a moment; the fullback’s head had turned into the blonde woman’s. Then the man was past him, and Vic still had the ball.
Controlled violence had erupted around him as the offensive line fought to keep the defense at bay. Vic saw a big, blue-jerseyed defender get free and run toward him. Vic turned away and crashed into another blue-clad player who threw him to the ground.
“That’s what you deserve,” a female voice said as blue eyes looked down at him. Then the Falcon turned away, and she was gone.
“You okay, Vic?” Eddie Leonard, the fullback, offered a hand to help him up.
“Yeah.” He looked over at the defense. Eleven ugly football players. No blonde girl in sight.
“Get your head in it, man,” Eddie said, slapping his pads as they reached the huddle.
“19 Fly Wasp Bravo,” he called, comparing the coach’s signal to his wristband. They broke huddle and lined up, Vic standing behind the center in shotgun formation.
“Down! Set!”
This time it was the middle linebacker turning blonde and staring back at him with accusing blue eyes. “You had no right,” she said. “Being a football star doesn’t mean you can fuck anyone you want.”
“Go away!”
The ball flew toward him and bounced off his fingertips. Vic fell on it, and heard the whistle ending the play.
Getting to his feet, he heard another whistle and saw the referee signaling for a timeout. Trotting to the sideline, he looked up at the stands and froze.
Thousands of blonde faces stared down at him, blue eyes piercing his soul. This wasn’t fair. She was ruining his game, his life.
“You deserve this, asshole!” thousands of voices roared in unison, forcing him to cover his ears. “Was it worth it?”
Hoffman fell to his knees. “Stop it! Stop it, please!” he sobbed, as three more Bekahs ran toward him from the sideline. “No! No!”
“It looks like something is wrong with Tiger Quarterback Vic Hoffman.”
“Jake, he hasn’t looked like himself this first drive, and with the way he’s acting now, you have to wonder if Andre Lisbon hit him harder than we thought back on first down.”
A phone rang, and the volume on the television was muted.
“Hello?” A blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl leaned back in her chair. The apartment was a mile from the stadium, but she could still hear the PA announcer’s voice through the closed window.
“Hey Grandma,” she said, fiddling with the charm of her necklace. “Bekah” was spelled out in flowing gold script. “You saw? I think he’s learning an important lesson. Thanks for the advice.”
Bekah looked down at a box on the table, where a plastic doll in an orange jersey was surrounded by hundreds of pictures of her smiling face.
Story Note (expanded): I love sports, but it’s damnably hard to find a new way to tell a sports story. “We won” or “we lost but learned” tend to be the main options.
Then I started thinking in terms of horror, and had the idea of a stadium filled with thousands of the same face. But why would someone experience something like that? The simple answer was a football player who had taken “liberties” with a female student who wanted revenge. It took the power out of the big man’s hands, and put it in the hands of his victim in front of thousands, if not millions of people.
It’s something that should happen far more often than it does.