Charlie Mills at the Carrot Ranch Literary Community posts flash fiction challenges a couple of times every month. The current challenge was to write a story that includes buttons and uses 99 words, no more no less, to do it. I remembered one of my mother’s mother’s stories. Here are my 99 words:

“When my grandma Mae was a young wife, living in Akron, elastic had not yet been invented. She said she was walking home from buying groceries, past the local tavern, both arms loaded with groceries, when the buttons on her underwear popped. She said she hesitated for only a brief moment, glancing at the men lounging against the light poles and stumbling on the street. She never knew if her buttons came unbuttoned or if they popped off—because she simply stepped out of her underpants and walked the rest of the way home, leaving them on the sidewalk.”

How about you? Have you got a special grandma story? Does it have buttons in it? How about an old technology?