The Vacation – Fiction

Time for this week’s Flash Fiction For Aspiring Writers.   It begins anew each Wednesday.   100-150 words more or less to do with   the photo below  (photo changes each week).  I’ll put the link to this week’s stories at the end of this piece.  Blogs, like this, are such a great gift for writers – and I believe readers,  too.  Pass on by – click on the froggy at the end of this story.

Thanks  to PJ for hosting this for us each week, and all her hard work on our behalf.

This week’s photograph is given us by a friend of mine!  When she was showing me ones we might use, I loved this one so much – boys on the beach and all the memories it brought.

The Vacation

I was packing to move into an assisted living cottage.   My daughter, Rainbow, was helping me sort through loose photographs,  ticket stubs from rock concerts,  and old matchbooks.

“What in the world is this, Mom?” Rainbow asked.  She was holding an old photograph that must have fallen from  one of my childhood scrapbooks.

A family vacation.  On the beach.  A group of  junior high school boys.  Flexing their nonexistent muscles.  Grinning ear-to-ear-proud every one except the one on the left in the back row.

“Oh, that’s the boy I didn’t marry.”  I smiled,  fondly,  and tucked the photograph into the ‘keep box’.

Rainbow cast me a surprised glance.  It was my chance to say, “I had a life before you were born,” but I stopped myself.

Ellespeth