The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Madonna and a mafia boss

Genre: Coming of age

Setting: CIA headquarters

Trope: Broken-down vehicle

POV/tense: Second/present

And the result:

Like a Virgin

The only thing you ever wanted to be was a CIA spook, just like your father. But here you are, a month shy of 20, on an internship at CIA Headquarters, but instead of sitting in some cushy office with the AC blasting going over dental records from some serial killer’s victims, you’re in the hot and sweaty bowels of the building. Not just bowels as in depth, but also bowels as in it stinks, like someone’s been stuffing bodies in the wall and not even prepping them with lye.

Mister Sunshine is making you clean out an old busted Chevy Malibu that’s sitting in a parking bay. Why there’s a parking bay all the way down here, and how the car even got here in the first place, is one of those mysteries of life that you’ll never solve.

“How’d it get here?” you ask stupidly.

“It fell off a truck,” he says, then laughs and goes back to chomping his cigar. He likes to use lame mafia jokes, maybe because he is a lame mafia joke, an ex mob boss who got a sweetheart deal from the government in exchange for becoming one of them.

You climb in the backseat with a bucket full of fabuloso and scrub what looks to be animal entrails from the carpet. After about an hour of this all you want to do is take the hottest shower ever when you hear a tap on the window. You ignore it. The taps get more frantic.

“Jeez, don Corleone, I’m fist deep in gristle. Gimme a break why don’t you.”

“Excuse me?” a lady’s voice says.

It pings something familiar in you. When you turn you see a tiny blonde woman. Her face looks overstuffed and pulled but her body is sick. You stare at her. She meets your gaze and does not smile and then it hits you.

“Holy shit, you look like that old lady, Madonna.”

“Old???” she says in a low voice that sounds like murder.

“No, I mean…”

She sighs. “Yes, I am her, and no, she is not old. Next question.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Good. Then keep your mouth shut and listen to me very carefully. I want this car cleaned by end of day. And when I say cleaned I mean pristine. Like clean enough for a woman to give birth to a baby in it. Get me?”

You run your hand over fragments of bone. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” She twists a gold pendant that hangs in her cleavage. “Stop staring. It’s rude.”

“Wait, what are you doing here?” You ask.

She rolls her eyes. “I work here. What do you think, you dolt?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA,” she mimics in a high pitched voice.

“I don’t talk like that.”

She smirks. “You’re new here, aren’t you.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “I need that car tonight. Spotless. It’s a gibbous moon and the sacrifice must go off without a hitch or else we’re in a world of trouble. And by world I mean world. Our world. The whole world.”

“What are you going to do with this car?”

She flings her hands in the air. “I just told you. It has to be clean enough for a birth. The baby, that’s all that matters.”

“And the mother?”

She shoots you a withering look. “That’s not for you to know. Any other questions, smart boy?”

“No ma’am.

“Don’t you ma’am me.”

Just like she orders, you finish scrubbing. And when you go home, tired and sour, you vow that you will never set foot in that cursed place again. So much for becoming a spook.