The P.O.W.

Wednesday/Friday has rolled around once again. Today’s story weighs in at 99 words, Finally, I’m under the 100-word limit. I have good news to share. My story A Perfect Death as been accepted for publication in the October 17th edition of the on-line magazine Sweet Tree Review! I’m super excited.

I’ve seen too much, felt too much
Lost everything
Nothing is what it should have been
What I’d planned
At seventeen

They took me and bent me
Into a man I don’t recognize
I walk through my days
Guarded and stealthy

Waiting to be taken again
Waiting to be thrown into a box
Beaten and hounded
Starved
Frozen
Unbearably alone

But I’ve done what is needed
To keep me sane
Made plans

Behind this door?
Enough food to keep me alive for a year
That door?
Blankets upon blankets
What?
The last door?
Can you not hear the voices?

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Black Widow

It’s Wednesday-Friday again, the day we Friday Fictioneers put fingertips to keys and type out 100-word stories inspired by the picture prompt our Fairy Blog Mother posts. Hooray! for Rochelle! Thank you. And Hooray! to my fellow bloggers. I look forward to each and every one of your stories.

My Dear Mrs. Pinkington,
At the age of 85, I never thought I would find love again
but have discovered more beauty in you than any other woman.

Tsk. Tsk. You old fool
Nellie Pinkington inspects the barely visible surgical scars along her hairline.

I would be honored if you would agree to marry me as soon as possible.
In our waning years, we have little time to spare.

You don’t know the half of it.

All I own will be yours. Please say yes.
Sincerely, Walter

Grinning, Nellie opens the satin box containing fifteen
Or is it sixteen?
wedding rings.

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He Said

By the sixth month of the remodel, Frankie couldn’t bear Nancy’s screechy voice.
“You said it’d take three weeks!”
“You said pink tiles! Then frickin’ put in blue! And them stairs is too damn steep!”
“You said…” “You said…” “You said…”
When’d you turn into such a punk? Frankie thought as he said, “Yeah, Hon, I’ll fix you right up.”
Frankie went to Billenger’s Hardware, bought pink tile, five feet of rope and a sheet of canvas.
“Nance?” he said to the neighbors. “Uh, she went on a little trip.”
Nancy was right. Replacing the blue tiles with pink was a good idea.

 

Time

I have been absent from Friday Fictioneers for about six months. In March I got the dreaded call, “It’s Mom, come quick” and flew to Denver, CO on the red-eye. My sisters and I stayed with our parents in the home we grew up in for three months helping Mom (92 years old) through hospice. She passed away in June. We resettled Dad (95 years old) in an assisted living home near my sisters in Eckert, CO. He died of a broken heart (I’m absolutely sure) on August 31st. Soon I will be returning to Denver for his funeral. So, if I remain spotty in reading your submissions, forgive me. Thanks for “listening”.

Her mother told her that time heals all wounds
Liar

Not the ones that shatter the heart
and leave edges so jagged
and raggedy
they refuse to fit back together
no matter how often a friend
or acquaintance
tries to stitch them back together
with a salve of words or an awkward and untimely hug

Without question
some wounds are meant to be left
hanging
on the edge of life
lurking
in the rarely visited crevices of the mind
waiting
to rise up ​to remind
the wounded that they are not healed
and never will be

Words Hurt

It’s Wednesday/Friday and time for the merry band of Friday Fictioneers to follow our fearless leader, Rochelle, down a tangled path littered with 100 – or so – words. Thanks to all my fellow writers for contributing well thought out stories of fiction that keep me entertained for days.

“Look at her,” they said.
“Her dress is ugly,” they said.
“She is ugly!”
The girls began to giggle.

Anna studied her reflection in the lake. Her dress was sewn from gossamer silk with narrow blue stripes and golden buttons.
Her mother had whispered that Anna’s hair was “soft as eiderdown” while braiding the long blonde strands.

“And stupid,” they said.

Confused, Anna stepped into the water, ruining her silver pumps.
She swam away from shore while the girls laughed and threw stones.

When the principal announced “The Siemens award for math goes to Anna Friedland”​
Anna floated face down in the lake.

Unwanted Migration

 

“Give me your tired . . . poor . . . huddled masses, blah blah blah.” Thompson stares at the replica of Miss Liberty where Mayor Bernard plopped her down at the entrance to the harbor. “Without askin’ a god damn one of us.”
Well, the masses came to huddle – everywhere.
“S’posed to be too cold for them to migrate here. Give me the creeps.”
Big ones, little ones, black, white, yellow, red.
“Even stripey.” Thompson grimaces. “Liberty and Bernard can have ’em all.”
Thompson starts his engine and pulls away from shore not realizing two enormous stripey snakes are huddled in his bed.

Escaping Culloden

Culverins fired.
Crocks rattling against the walls of her stone farmhouse
Rhona crammed memories inside a sporran: her wedding shift, mother’s thimble, dead daughter’s rattle.
After two months of eating nothing but apples, the shift no longer fit.
Still, Rhona needed something to remind her of happier days.

“Head north,” her husband had instructed before falling in with the Jacobites.
“Bring the stones to ensure your passage.”

Clothed in dark trousers and a clan MacDougall shawl
Rhona pushed through a crush of villagers, moving south.
Enveloped in billowing smoke,
she hoped no one would notice the ruby earrings hidden beneath her hair.

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