Since you’ve already read it—unless you have a habit of reading this section first, and if you did, you may want to stop right here and read the story—the scene in the kitchen where the lawyer gets knocked to the floor and decapitated was the one clip I kept seeing over and over again.
But instead of the lawyer being the helpless victim, it was revenge on the highest sorts.
This visual, of the lawyer being thrown back and beheaded, stuck with me for a long time. I knew the story would be called Guest of Honor and that the lawyer, from the Twin Cities, would be traveling up to northwestern Minnesota as a family’s guest. The rest grew as I wrote the story.