This week’s prompt:

Winner of a TV reality show, a broken bone, New Jersey

It was bound to happen. Kirk was not even remotely surprised. The way these kids reacted when the cast and especially the winner of this year’s The Biggest Ego in America were making an appearance.

The show was in its 25th season and still going strong. The surviving winners were few and far between, but they remained popular as ever. A wall of shrieking tween girls pushed up on his position again, and he shoved them back with his clear shield again. He loathed working crowd control at these events. Loathed working crowd control, period.

When he moved here to New Jersey, he thought Newark would be the fresh start he needed. A change from the grind and horror Detroit had turned into in after the 2024 riots that destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure and sparking the second civil war.

His home town was so bad now it dedicated the entire police force to handling homicides only. Armed robbery? Call us back when someone’s dead? Home invasion? Assault? You’re still alive, quit wasting our time.
A new wave of children screamed their way to the stage line, and he held them back again. Right now, that job was far preferable to this. Protecting the talent was their only objective. Could not have a repeat of Phoenix where Wally the 8th Wonder, or whatever his name was, fell off the stage, and the fans trampled him in their excitement, breaking both his legs. He would not be doing his peacock strutting for crowds for a few more weeks still.

A small, dark part of Kirk wanted to let it happen. Let the crushing crowds swarm the stage, trampling the unworthy stars of their bull shit television shows to the ground and tear them to pieces looking for trophies. Instead, he held firm and pushed back, removing another line of little girls and their not so little mothers from his face. The reprieve would be less than a few seconds. It would never end.