Tag: families

Escape

This is my contribution—late—to the Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge. As always, it’s 99 words, no more no less. The challenge is to write an escape. I’m trying to condense my novel-in-progress into 99 words. Let’s see how it goes.

Analog Recording System Broke Down. Now All Digital

She sat, shredding tissue in her lap, waiting for a counselor. Once he’d passed out, she’d tied her husband, spread-eagled, to their four-poster bed using two pairs of thigh-hi nylons. Then she beat him with his own belt—the buckle end. Bruises and abrasions on her own body still throbbed. The old ones made her skin a rainbow. He was a lawyer. Every time she’d tried to leave, he’d found a way to block her. If she could make them believe she was a danger to him, maybe they would check her in and save her life—and his.

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Categories: Families Fiction

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Pines

Another GirlieOnTheEdge challenge. Prompt word: Pine

Who can think of pines without the pine trees lining Jim Croce’s winding road in his song “I’ve Got a Name?”

I first heard it on an eight-track album recorded by Helen Reddy.

Or how about Pine Sol, that cleaner we poured in buckets and washtubs to scrub our floors or scour our sinks and toilets?

I think of the row of pines my dad and grandfather planted at the edge of a little game preserve at the foot of the dam where the overflow from the spillway could keep them wet.

I can see my dad, lying in the pasture grass chewing on a stem, hands behind his head, listening to the breeze shushing through the trees.

My dad and granddad both died when I was just a kid, but those trees have become giants, edging gnarled Russian olives, broken down floribunda roses, and a variety of volunteer native trees and shrubs.

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Categories: Non-fiction

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Atmospheric Pressure

As I write prairie, weather sometimes becomes a character with as much effect on human outcomes as my imagined people. The GirlieOnTheEdge six-sentence blog challenge word this week is atmosphere.

When he’s done yelling and screaming, he trundles off to bed and I stalk the house.

I feel the atmospheric pressure change; the screaming wind stills suddenly and I know what that means.

In the dark, I step outside to watch seething clouds above the house, where they swarm and churn.

I wish myself part of them, lifted out over the prairie, a swirling of atoms.

A spiral sorts itself out—a little, black tongue drops and recedes, moving to the northeast, dropping again, and I know someone not far away will lose something tonight.

In this house, for the first time, I’m allowing myself to recognize that it’s already lost.

What I didn’t realize when I shot this photo is that over the hill a little way, a tornado was upsetting a pivot irrigation system.
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Mama Was a Rock Star

This post comes from a Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. The challenge word/phrase this time was “rock star.“ You should try it.

She starred with big band orchestras in cities along the Eastern Seaboard and around the Great Lakes. Then she married a Nebraska farmer. He moved her to a stark little square house with a hip roof in the middle of a howling wilderness. In less than three years, she ran back to city lights—nightclubs—singing all night. .

But she came back. She adapted to the prairie’s silences and its screaming winds, the outhouse, the washboard, and the tyranny of crops and livestock. She became a better farm wife than many women who grew up on farms—she rocked.

Snow-covered farmstead with little relief from stark white.
This is a few years later (about 1950) and some of Daddy’s trees had started to grow. The volunteer mulberry tree (bottom right) still stands.
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Categories: Families Our Prairie Habitat

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What’s in the Trunk?

This is another of those six sentence challenges. The prompt word for this week is trunk.

Sometimes these old steamer trunks sat in people’s bedrooms, never used for travel, but for storing the most precious items.
  1. She died in February.
  2. Sometime later, we opened her steamer trunk.
  3. We found silk flowers, her favorite scent, her ruffled organdy dresses, a dental mold, and a detective’s license.
  4. Mom said she fell in love with a dentist who disappeared one day.
  5. She got her detective’s training and set out to find him—she did.
  6. He was married.
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Categories: Families Fiction

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Five Thirty-Two

Uncle George had had a few beers that night. Quite a few actually. Somehow, the topic of duck hunting came up and my son’s ears perked. He was ten or eleven at the time. He asked a bunch of questions and, before you know it, George had invited him on a duck hunt the next day.

“Now, you have to get up really early to hunt ducks,” George told him. “It’s not like pheasants that you can hunt in the afternoon. So I’ll meet you here at the bottom of the stairs at five thirty-two tomorrow morning. Do you think you can make it?”

Sean nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. I can.” My boy’s eyes shone. He’d never before been invited to hunt with the men.

“Well, you’d better turn in,” George suggested. “Five thirty-two comes pretty early.”

Sean agreed and disappeared to one of the bedrooms. I don’t know if he slept that night. I know he had no alarm clock, but at five thirty-two he was sitting on the bottom step. Aunt Walleen nearly stumbled on him on the way to the bathroom that morning.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Uncle George said he’d take me duck hunting at five thirty-two.”

I wasn’t there, but I can imagine that Walleen grinned a wicked grin as she returned to the bedroom. She’d have shaken George’s shoulder none too gently.

“What? What’s the matter? Is the house on fire?”

“No fire, George, but you promised a kid you’d take him hunting.”

George rolled over. “Okay. Okay. I’ll take him hunting this afternoon.”

“He’s waiting on the steps, George. You told him you would take the dog and go duck hunting at five thirty-two this morning.”

“But I don’t have a duck dog.”

“Don’t matter, George.”

“Five thirty-two,” he mumbled. “Why would I say such a thing?”

“You were drunk, George.”

“Had to be.”

“Well, he’s waiting and you’d better pry that old body of yours out of this bed and take that boy hunting.”

So Uncle George pried his eyes open and lifted himself out of his nice, warm, comfortable bed and braved the ice on the lake to take my boy duck hunting. They did not bag a single duck. I’m not sure they even saw one.

But an old guy kept his word to a young one, even though he was a little late.

And that means something.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

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Out of Touch

“Ella Mae, what’s wrong?”

My mother had not heard from her own mother for ten years. Not one word. She didn’t know where Grandma Mae lived. Still in Chicago, she thought, but how would she know? She had no address and no ‘phone number. Grandma had moved and left no forwarding address, but the night my father suddenly died of a massive coronary, Grandma called. She didn’t wait for “hello,” didn’t waste time on small talk. Her first words went right to the heart of the devastation in our household.

“Ella Mae. What’s wrong?”

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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