Fiction Monday! Just under the wire of my usual deadline …

The Foolish and the Weak

Five pairs of shoes plus one littered the foyer of the remodeled plantation house. Somewhere a crow cawed. The ceiling creaked as Mary walked around upstairs. He stood in the entry to the dinning room, smoking a pipe.

“It seems a very silly thing to be,” said the young girl of about thirteen, who sat at the dinning room table and nibbled intently on a piece of toast.

“What?” he asked, absentminded, sending a plume of smoke around his face, which was turned away from her.

“Why would anyone ever want to be one? Won’t you just be sad and annoyed with the world all the time? Or worse, won’t you go around pretending that you have it all figured out when you really don’t know anything at all?”

She gasped in horror and raised the octave of her voice, frightening herself by what she then asked. “Or worse than that, will you be so proud that you don’t know anything at all that you’ll be insufferable all the time and no one shall ever want to love you and children will hate it when you come around because you will ruin all the best stories?”

She clutched the half-eaten toast fiercely in her hands, the way a priest held the broken wafer, her eyes in a squint. She was not one for hyperbole and had not, in the young man’s memory, embellished even the dullest of stories in her short and sober life. Continue Reading…

It’s another fiction Monday. After a wonderful and successful poetry reading at UMHB, I’m back to crafting out some prose for the next few weeks …

“The Roar”

She is sitting in her kitchen on an average and modest summer day. The smell of baking cake lingers in the air. A vanilla, sugary-sweet swell. Heavy. Suffocating. She sniffs. Her left ankle tucks carefully behind her right and her white pumps cling to her heels, revealing no trace of panty-hosed feet. Simple, unpretentious dresses with appropriate accents are her choice attire, and today she wears a brown housewife’s uniform with white collar and cuffs to match her shoes. Her brunette hair is pulled neatly back in a coiffure, her eyes stare into the distance, and her shoulders remain stiff, rigid, awkward. She sips her coffee slowly, careful not to smudge her lipstick. As she sets the cup down, rays of sunlight reflect from the shimmering clear window behind her to the porcelain yellow of the mug and then to the creamy white of the pearls around her neck. The pearls are too tight. Like a noose. She takes her index finger and pulls at them slightly to relieve the tension. Mrs. Abigail, the woman, forces a smile as her little boy of seven, Matthew, whose presence at the other side of the table Mrs. Abigail has forgotten, tells his mother that she looks pretty today. She thanks him. She sends him out to play in the yard. Continue Reading…