Prose: Mama
note: Ok so i have been looking up magazines to submit my writing to and i found one that gives you the first line and you have to turn it into a short fiction story. So i did. And i came up with this depressing thing. Enjoy.
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Mama had always had a love for other people’s possessions.
Before she sat in the ash of sunrise, before she rocked with the force of illness and decay, before the phone stopped ringing and the shades were drawn; before they took her away.
Out in the yard, apples rotted, fermented, their skins turning oily and soft and melting beneath the field grass. Newspapers formed a smooth soggy mound on the mat, headlines long forgotten.
Maybe we could have known, by the way she smelled (of smoke and antiseptic), by her transparent skin, her grey fumbling lips or her creaky yellowed mattress. Or maybe we couldn’t.
Either way, mama lost her mind one day in June. A day where the sun was weak and the wind was burnt and her hair was like a white flame on her pillow.
Mama didn’t know us by then; age and disease had swept the blueness from her eyes like pale sand. Mama didn’t know of the bed she lay in, or the elm tree reaching towards her window, or the purple stain on the stairs where I had spilled grape juice as a child.
She knew the hollowness of herself, the comfort of her clammy skin, soft as clay, her tiny decomposing body. And she probably knew of the moon, awkward and lustrous and silver and maybe of the war.
I don’t think she thought of her matches, the covers brittle and yellowed, left over from dinners and parties and swiped from various purses, foggy with dust, filling the drawers of her old bureau.
I don’t think she thought of me, or of anybody else on that day; that day when she lost her mind, her one sacred possession.
And I thought I saw it, flap into the burnt wind like a scarf. Her hair like a white flame on her pillow.
The end.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Mama had always had a love for other people’s possessions.
Before she sat in the ash of sunrise, before she rocked with the force of illness and decay, before the phone stopped ringing and the shades were drawn; before they took her away.
Out in the yard, apples rotted, fermented, their skins turning oily and soft and melting beneath the field grass. Newspapers formed a smooth soggy mound on the mat, headlines long forgotten.
Maybe we could have known, by the way she smelled (of smoke and antiseptic), by her transparent skin, her grey fumbling lips or her creaky yellowed mattress. Or maybe we couldn’t.
Either way, mama lost her mind one day in June. A day where the sun was weak and the wind was burnt and her hair was like a white flame on her pillow.
Mama didn’t know us by then; age and disease had swept the blueness from her eyes like pale sand. Mama didn’t know of the bed she lay in, or the elm tree reaching towards her window, or the purple stain on the stairs where I had spilled grape juice as a child.
She knew the hollowness of herself, the comfort of her clammy skin, soft as clay, her tiny decomposing body. And she probably knew of the moon, awkward and lustrous and silver and maybe of the war.
I don’t think she thought of her matches, the covers brittle and yellowed, left over from dinners and parties and swiped from various purses, foggy with dust, filling the drawers of her old bureau.
I don’t think she thought of me, or of anybody else on that day; that day when she lost her mind, her one sacred possession.
And I thought I saw it, flap into the burnt wind like a scarf. Her hair like a white flame on her pillow.
The end.
posted by ~Allie~ @ 5:19 PM
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