Snails & Funerals – Fiction

Here is my story for Friday Fictioneers on Veteran’s Day. Friday Fictioneers is hosted by Rochelle, and this week’s photo was given  by  J. Hardy Carroll.

Oh good lord!  I’m so sorry.  I’m getting the challenge rules confused 😦  I can’t get my story off the challenge page so…it’s a few words over the limit.  Don’t read it if that upsets you.  Again, I’m sorry. 

It’s 100 words now 😛

Click on the blue frog at the end of this story for this week’s other stories.

Snails & Funerals

We were burying Cousin Irene. She’d wanted to be buried right next to her husband, Saul. They’d had one of those mixed marriages. Irene was a Catholic. Saul wasn’t. Saul was a war hero.

Sissy and I were 6 years old. We were dressed in our best white sundresses. Sissy was fiddling with the newly turned soil covering Cousin Irene’s grave.

“Ewww. What’s that?” Sissy asked. She was pointing to the gravestone.

“Ewww,” I replied. “That’s a slimy old snail.”

“What to do?” Sissy asked.

“Well, like Papa says, it’s not worth cleaning and eating,”  I whispered.

We skipped away.

Ellespeth

The Softness of Kudzu – Fiction

This piece is submitted for Friday Fictioneers.  Thanks to David Stweart for our photo prompt and to Rochelle  for hosting this weekly photo challenge.  Please click on the lil froggy – at the end of this piece – for other stories.

The Softness of Kudzu

There’s just a rusting iron fence remaining. The grand antebellum house is gone. Kudzu vine covers its foundation.  I drove here today because Mother is dying and, when this was a home for single mothers, she’d taken us to live here.

Daddy was in hospital, then, being treated for some mysterious illness Mother’s family had whispered about – as though a curse had come true.

Sister Agnes greeted us and showed us to our room. It was a small room with four cots. “Thank you, Sister,” Mother said.

I remember, just outside the French doors was a balcony and banana trees and Heaven’s sky.

Ellespeth

This is a photograph of Kudzu vine:

Blue Shuttered Love – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!P

Blue Shuttered Love

While Frank was at work that day, Stella unpacked the kitchen boxes. She wanted everything to be perfect for the first supper in their new home.

Stella hung rice paper lanterns. She gave the room a bistro look by hanging coffee cups from shelf hooks. Everything was blue and bright and waiting to be used.

“So what are we going to name it?” Frank asked later. He was playing along with Stella’s determination to name each room.

“How about Virgin Kitchen?” The blue shutters had reminded Stella of kitchen fairies innocently fluttering about.

“With a table like that?” Frank teased.

Ellespeth

photo thanks to  -© Raina Ng

Monterey – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

Monterey

Remember Monterey that Fall?  The first of everything seemingly important in life?  Our first Jazz Festival?  We were still virgins?  “That’s heavy,”  meant being too loaded to comprehend?

And now, here we are.  Married fifty years and downloading our music onto a memory stick.

You turn to me. Your blue eyes are twinkling with mischief. “Let’s go to the festival again this year. Maybe dance a little jig or two?”

The sky was so blue that festival day. Our world was so perfectly perfect. Tuck and Patti played into the sunset. You bought me a delicate rose quartz necklace.

Ellespeth

photo prompt  – © C. Hase

Moving Day – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

This story marks a year I’ve been pestering people with Friday Fictioneers. I really never dreamed that I could write a story almost as short as my poetry, so I’m grateful for the encouragement I’ve received here. For me, Friday Fictioneers has become as addictive as Crème Brûlée.

My offering, this week, is a 100 word piece about Chloe – a fairy character I’ve written about before in my infrequent series “Once Upon A Bed Again”

Moving Day

When Miss Randolph died she left behind a garden – famous for miles around,  and me.

My name is Chloe.  I’m a fairy and I live in a dewdrop, on a bougainvillea leaf, deep in Miss Randolph’s garden.  I’m moving today.  It won’t be the same here without her.  You see, we’ve known each other since she was a young child.  When I first moved here,  I was her bedroom fairy.  Then I was her garden fairy.  At the end, I was once again her bedroom fairy.

I don’t want to move too far away.  Miss Randolph promised she’d visit me often.

Ellespeth

photo prompt – © Santoshwriter

When Silo Was Born – Fiction

 Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

When Silo Was Born

Everyone waited out in the heat that afternoon. We looked at each other with fear in our eyes. The silo, just outside our town, had blown apart. People talked sparks and metal and I’m in labor just about then.

My daddy was crying as they wheeled me into the delivery room. I kept asking for you. My mother squeezed my hand. She was crying, too.

He came out so beautiful and perfect and screaming his way into this world. I named him Silo. Since we hadn’t chosen a name yet, that one seemed best to me at the time.

Ellespeth

 

prompt -© Marie Gail Stratford

Last Night I Dreamed – Fiction

 Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

We need some rain here in California.  The world needs its people to conserve this precious resource – water.  So here goes this:

Last Night I Dreamed

It hadn’t rained in months and I was convinced it would never rain again.  We were using bath water, already shared,  on our balcony plants.

And then I dreamed I was back on the bayou hosing down Grandma’s  carport.  It was raining cats and dogs but shell roads dry fast, and Grandma wanted that carport hosed down so people didn’t track dust inside all day.   A thin sheet of tin covered the carport.  The sound of rain, hitting the tin, was magical.

I woke up crying and thankful for the wet taste of salt on my lips.

Ellespeth

PHOTO PROMPT – © Madison Woods

When Cash Meant Something In Life – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

When Cash Meant Something In Life

One morning my sister,  Iris,  and I were walking to work at our family’s antique store.  It was early,  but the New Orleans French Quarter was already bustling with activity.

For several days, we’d been watching the progress of workers making some sort of hole in the wall at the old Hibernia Bank building.  We were quite amazed that this sort of hole in the wall could even be allowed in such an old Spanish era building.

On this particular morning, the work had been finished.  Atop some odd-looking post office box contraption read:

ATM Machine

“What do you think that means?” Iris asked me.

Ellespeth

photo prompt – © Dee Lovering

Wild Ferns – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

This piece continues a story I wrote yesterday.  That story can be found here  – take a peek if you have time – but…I think this one can also stand alone.

Wild Ferns

After meeting online and exchanging surface information about our poetry, we’d decided to meet at the Millbrae Train Station.

He’s handsome,  in a rugged hiker’s sense.  His beard is short and gray like his hair.  His eyes are bright blue and pierce right through a soul.

We walked around downtown Millbrae and had sandwiches  at Pickles.  It was there that I asked him about his work.  He lost me  after the words ‘optical telescopes’.  Something he said made me think of wild ferns growing in the swamps back home.  One day, I’ll ask him about that.

After supper, we walked to a cafe.  Poets were reading.

Ellespeth

photo prompt © Douglas M. MacIlroy

That Summer – Fiction

Time for another installment of   Friday Fictioneers  hosted by Rochelle.  100 words or so based on the image below. Click on the froggy link (after this piece) and come join us!

This week’s photo is given by  © Roger Bultot.

That Summer

Between the Blessed Mary devotional candles and patchouli incense, the town’s never known what caused the fire at Miss Lucy’s place.

Just as she’d done every year, Miss Lucy put up flyers in the local cafes and holistic shops:  Come To The Summer Solstice Seance.

“Let’s not go this year, Niles,” Sadie said to her husband. She was cooking red beans and making corn bread.

Niles looked up from his magazine. He sniffed and walked to the kitchen window. Smoke was coming from Miss Lucy’s living room window.

“What’s that smell?” Sadie asked.

“Just an early summer,” Niles replied.

Ellespeth