An Execution

Gather together three or four ordinary people. Let them meet in a businesslike environment-- a conference room, a grade school class room after school hours, a hotel room. These three or four people are going to decide to put someone to death. They are not government officials, rogue CIA agents, Mafia lieutenants-- they're just plain folks. And the person they choose to executes is also a run-of-the-mill person just like them, except he is slated for death. Stay is this room. Don't follow through on the death sentence. Simply watch this group decide who needs to die and why. Choosing the victim is going to be hard. Keeping the group from simply going after someone who has angered them or cut them off in line or slept with a spouse - that is your problem. This group of executioners should know one another but not too terribly well. Don't tell us why or how they've been chosen to do this; just accept the situation and try to let them accept it too. POV - the executioners' , as well as the intended victim's in a sense - will matter a great deal. One POV will predominate. You probably want to tell us this scene from a dramatic perspective, allowing only spoken ideas to come out (don't show us the executioners' thoughts) 

700 WORDS

This exercise is based on the Donald Barthelme STORY "Some of Us Had Been Threatening our Friend Colby." The second sentence of the story is, "And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him." The Barthelme story is not about murder but the moral (though comic) consequences of murder as relatively reasonable and sane people might see them in advance. Don't make this exercise about murder or a mob execution either. Treat the possibility that a few ordinary people could decide one day to kill one of their acquaintances honestly and plainly. Remove one layer of societal prohibition from the mix, but don't remove all prohibitions. This execution should still trouble these people.