It’s that time, another fiction Monday, with a little short story to share with you all. But this post also has roots in something else, it has roots in answering Tamara’s question about what a girl is worth. As I reflected on that this past week, this little story walked into my head. Tamara asked us to share and it took me a while to decide what to write, but somehow fiction helped me make sense of it better. This isn’t my best turn of words yet, but there’s something true in it, from me to you …

A Seed of Discontent

A ghostly shiver from the exposed metal of a railing against the Parish Hall wall trailed its way up Jane’s right leg and caressed her thigh. Immediately she was taken back, half-drunk, slumped in his arms, pressed against the hallway wall, their mouths hungry and certain. He had collided with one of the hanging pictures when she had pushed herself against him, keeping their bodies close together. It had swung on its small nail before teetering forward and falling onto the wood floor, shattering the glass with a deafening chaos.

It was the crash that had brought Jane’s husband running, even though he was supposed to be working late. It was the chaos that had brought the dissolution of their marriage, though they had been swinging on their small nail of stability for years. It was the shattering that made Jane stand alone at the charity auction for St. John the Divine’s Day School, where their daughter Gina attended.

She had worn black, something that stopped right at her knee and was slit midway down her back. It felt pathetic in a way, considering her age, but it was the only formal dress she had thought to pack when she had made her hasty exit from their house a week earlier. Jane’s blonde strands were pulled back into a loose bun, her golden earrings bouncing as she walked, heels gently clicking against the floor. Her evening bag, golden and sparkling, remained firmly clutched in her left hand.

“Would you like something to drink?” The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, offering a golden serving platter arrayed with red and white wine. She wore a starched catering uniform with a golden nameplate on her right breast, which read Kristi. Jane immediately both hated and loved her, seeing in her glazed eyes the same woman she had been only two decades before, serving the same drinks, sneaking to the bathroom on break to snort the same line of coke, promising herself the same thing each time: that she would be better, would be someone, someday, if she only had the chance.

And she had.

She had gone to college and done well. She had married Kevin when she was twenty-six, gotten pregnant when she was twenty-eight, miscarried two months later, and had gotten pregnant again, thanks to the fertility treatments, when she was thirty-one. It had meant that she had never gotten more than her Masters in French Literature, but at the time she had decided that being at home with Gina was the right thing to do. At least, everyone seemed to tell her that. Continue Reading…