ST4.08 | "The Rules"
AUGUST 2026
THESE SOCCER MOMS WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME
This month, we’re looking for stories by and about women. Specifically, we’re looking for the challenges modern women face, anywhere from the workplace to the invisible labor of maintaining a home, to the stresses of being a mom. We want to see what happens when the women in our lives who so effortlessly look like they’re keeping it all together finally begin to crack, and of course, the fallout that ensues. Yeah, home is where the heart is, but only because there’s a woman there, doing all the work. And not only does she know where the heat is, she has access to plenty of knives.
THE RULES
by Emily J. Edwards
Hannah decided, if she ever made it back to one, to ask a gynecologist to define what exactly they meant by “a little”: a little pinch, a little uncomfortable, a little cramping. It was like her insides were being scraped out by her grandma’s old manual lawnmower, the kind with the blades that’d take off your toe if you didn’t mind yourself.
She hadn’t told Kane about it, which she knew was kind of cheating, but he broke the rules first. He wasn’t supposed to pick up high school girls anymore, especially now they had been together for three years. He told her it was her fault, that she was suffocating him, she wasn’t dressing right, that she just didn’t do it for him anymore. There must have been some law she broke to make everyone treat her like shit. Her mother, her brother, and now Kane.
Hannah set her socials to private and begged her brother to stop talking to him at the job site, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do anything to embarrass himself in front of the men at work. Hannah’s brother was a coward. That was probably her fault, too.
She should have thrown away the tests at work– wrap them up in toilet paper and no one would see them in the bottom of the bin in the employee washroom– but she was too busy barfing day and night to think straight. She knew what was happening as soon as she smelled her mother cooking bacon and up came a flood of yellow bile from an empty stomach.
She bought the test at the old mom-and-pop pharmacy one afternoon and paid in cash. They filmed everyone at the Wal-Mart checkout now, time- and date-stamped. Hannah felt like that should’ve been illegal, it had to be some kind of invasion of privacy. The old mom-and-pop couldn’t afford cameras, and the cash wouldn’t show up on any kind of record. Twelve ninety-nine for two tests. It would have been six for six dollars at Wal-Mart. The old lady who rang her up gave her a smile. Hannah didn’t smile back.
Her breath smelled like puke.
She bought the pills on her phone, using customer wi-fi in the parking lot of an oil change place. The pills cost almost five hundred. She told her mother she couldn’t make rent in July because the car needed brake pads. Her mother said that was a lousy excuse, but she would allow it just this once and Hannah needed to be more careful with her money. The house was paid off back when it belonged to her grandparents and Hannah didn’t know why she had to pay rent in the first place, but her mother said if she didn’t like it, Hannah could move herself out. The only places that were the same price were squat little trailers up on blocks in a dirt field on the east side of town, no bigger than a doghouse and probably infested with fire ants.
The pills showed up in two days in a brown envelope made out to her with the return address of a fake online trade school somewhere in Illinois. Hannah found directions inside in seven different languages. She could tell one was English and one was Spanish. She took the pills as directed and went to bed. Then she heard the trash cans fall over and Kane curse and heavy footsteps running away when the motion sensor lights came flooding on. Kane was terrified of trespassers at his own place, plenty of signs saying he’d shoot first and ask questions later, but every night since she broke up with him, she’d felt him stalking her like a jaguar.
As soon as she thought it was safe, as soon as she was sure Kane had stopped prowling, Hannah packed a duffle and left. This time she took her trash with her, the empty cardboard packets for the pills and the multi-lingual instructions, tucking them right underneath her bottle of shampoo. Her purse pistol was already at the bottom of her bag.
If she kept a steady pace, she wouldn’t have to stop and fill up before she got to the state line. She hadn’t let her tank dip lower than half ever since she broke up with him. If she got out of the car, she knew he’d be there. Anywhere. There were four filling stations in Brownfield, one more in Plains. If she stopped, Kane would find her. She knew it in her twisting guts.
Hannah’s cell phone vibrated in the ash tray. She knew it would be Kane and she was stupid to pick up.
“What do you want?” She clenched the phone between her left shoulder and ear, and used her right hand to turn up the heat. Her teeth were chattering and she felt like she might shit herself. Were those the side effects? She knew there would be cramping, and maybe a little nausea. She should have been in bed.
“Fucking bitch.” She heard the engine of his cherry red truck rev through his Bluetooth. He was speeding up, wherever he was. Hannah checked her rear-view and saw nothing behind her, not even stars.
“It’s done,” she said. The hot blood trickling out of her told her it was still in process, but it would be done by the time the morning came. And if she was over the state line, he couldn’t get her. Not according to the rules. She didn’t have a destination in mind, just not Texas. Roswell would have a place she could stay, probably, for a little while. Maybe she could find a campground where she’d be allowed to sleep in the car.
“Ten thousand will only start to make up for what you did,” he shouted. If there was a way for Kane to make money, he found it. Selling her out for the bounty would be easy. He was a little drunk, which meant he was deep into the thirty rack of light beer he picked up at the liquor store at the edge of his housing development. It had cases of beer and four types of white wine. “I can find other ways to make you make it up to me.”
She hung up the phone and threw it so it bounced on the passenger seat but didn’t fall to the floor. She hoped it would fling itself into the footwell, breaking the screen and ridding her of any contact with the outside world. Maybe if she didn’t have a phone she wouldn’t have to hear that asshole talk at her ever again. And they couldn’t use it to find out if she had bought the pills.
She had already made the transition to 380 West. Just keep going west.
Her grandmother taught her how to drive, the only adult in her life who ever had time to raise her right. Grandma taught her the rules of the road, how to parallel park, and how to put on lipstick going eighty.
West Texas was flat and barren and boring. Hannah kept her eyes open for deer in the brittle, brown grass that stretched as far as she had ever seen. Her bald tires hummed against the shitty pavement and she turned on the radio to try to quiet her mind, but the only thing she could find were late-night preachers talking to late-night sinners and she wasn’t one of them, so she didn’t care to listen.
Her phone had been buzzing non-stop. She picked it up to turn it off, but found dozens of misspelled messages from Kane. All a variation upon a theme:
You bitch
You won’t get away
I’m calling the cops
I’ll hunt you down
You stupid bitch
Nothing he could say would make her stop. She still had over a quarter tank and she still felt the inside of her body twist and churn as the miracle of modern medicine swirled through her bloodstream. It was painful and she felt like she could pass out at any minute, but pain in her body was temporary. Being tied to Kane was eternal.
There was nothing for her in Lubbock anymore. She had once been a person there. Then they changed the rules. But Hannah had already learned the game and didn’t plan on playing the new one.
She was approaching town and bright halogens illuminated a dollar store parking lot next to a gas station with dead pumps. The sheriff’s deputy should have changed where he parked. She could see the shadow of the SUV just beyond the sign advertising the price of cigarettes. She slowed down to five below the speed limit, but he pulled out behind her, no lights but searing LED headlamps trailing her close. Her stomach was in knots, the saltines she ate before crawling into bed six hours ago threatening to come up in one, pale lump.
Maybe Kane had made the call.
A sign announced fifteen miles to the state line and the sheriff’s car behind her sped up just a bit, less than two car lengths from her bumper.
She was heading west but saw light. Another large SUV was down by the horizon, waiting. She pulled her pistol from her purse and set it in her lap.
She stayed at five below the speed limit– it felt like she was crawling past the cop on the side of the road. He joined the parade. The roof lights of the cruiser just behind her came on now, but no siren. Hannah picked up the gun in her left hand and settled her pointer not on the trigger, but above the button to roll down her window.
Hannah took her hand from the wheel and reached toward the dash to put on her blinkers. Maybe the Sheriff would think she was looking for a well-lit parking lot where she could pull over. There wouldn’t be one. There wasn’t anything out this far. The last town before the border– thirteen hundred people and a burger stand– was behind them. There were only a couple of things a bullet could hit out here– jack-shit nothing, a cop, or Hannah.
Hannah’s innards tied themselves in knots, the churn deepening in her lower abdomen and making her woozy. Medication mixed with terror. Another sheriff’s vehicle came up behind, lights blazing. This one had the siren going.
Hannah urged her ancient car faster and the sheriffs lagged behind. A sign advertised a roadside crystal store less than five miles away, just past the border. The red-and-blue lights on the sheriffs’ vehicles flanking the road ahead flashed like Independence Day fireworks.
They stood sentinel at Hannah’s only way out of Texas, ready to stop her from fleeing a crime scene the law now said she carried with her.
Hannah hit the power windows and it felt like ages until the highway wind hit her face and buffeted through the closed cabin of her beater. She leaned halfway out the driver’s side window, gun in hand, daring the men to see through the night and do to her what she knew they craved to do. She held the gun up, impossible to aim as she increased her speed. They couldn’t see her yet. If she just put her head back in the car, all they would do was stop her and take her away. Take her back.
Her bald tires chewed away at the road, the swerving, swarming sheriffs in her rearview never letting her out of their sights. Less than a mile to the border. There were three more SUVs and a few men on motorcycles. Agile enough to chase her down.
She wondered if they stopped her if they had their own pill to reverse the ones she had taken. She wasn’t sure if science worked like that, but she knew now she couldn’t risk it.
Her gas pedal hit the floor, the space between her car and the barricade contracting.
As soon as she saw the movement of bodies against the flashing lights, Hannah emptied her clip into anything she could manage to hit. The cars behind her peeled off and the waiting sheriffs answered fire. The windshield spread into a maze of cracks, a thousand paths leading from one bullet that met its mark.
A sharp, burning pain in the abdomen, so much more than a little pinch. She drove on for as long as she could. Hannah couldn’t see the men who continued unloading their bullets into the body of her little car. It was better than dying in jail for doing something that wasn’t illegal the first time Kane laid her down in the bed of his pickup truck.
If she’d known the rules of the game were going to change, she damn well never would have played.
EMILY J. EDWARDS (on Instagram @msemilyedwards, or on Bluesky @msemilyedwards.bsky.social; Pronouns: she/her/hers) is the author of the acclaimed Girl Friday Mystery series and host of the podcast Silver Screen Sleuths. She earned her degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and took the long road to becoming an author, working for over a decade as a wine and spirits journalist and radio producer. She currently resides in Los Angeles.