A quote: “I think that it’s important for people to understand that there’s a lot of mystery left in the world, there’s a lot of wonder left in the world and there are places that we don’t fully understand.” ~~ Josh Gates
I’ll start with a story …
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A sad, tiny house. The porch sags and the front yard is a mess of weeds, far from the tidy home Nicole and her cousins remember.
It was Eddie’s doing, of course. Ne’er-do-well (and only) son of Velma, he moved in when she went into a nursing home. He did nothing to keep up the place, indeed, went through and stripped out anything of value.
It took a deputy sheriff and Velma’s attorney to explain the facts to him after she passed. No, you don’t get the house, Eddie, nor the bank account. You get an income from a small annuity. Fini.
The deputy escorted him off the property.
The cousins are left with tying up the loose ends.
Nicole wants to weep looking at the back bedroom. Eddie had dumped all Velma’s personal stuff in here. Clothes, shoes, broken furniture. Nicole picks her way through – oh, the little black dress. She remembers pictures of Velma in it, champagne flute in hand. Velma dressed with such elegance. And the shoes! She picks up a few shoe boxes to look. Spectator pumps, kitten-heel slides, and here is a pair of satin heels complete with rhinestone buckles.
Nicole blinks. Rhinestones? Nicole moves to a window and squints at the stones. They are too bright, reflecting fire.
She shouts for her cousins and starts going through the rest of the boxes. Velma knew her son and hid her wealth in plain sight.
Oh, Aunty!
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped and modified, Adobe Stock standard license.
Susan O says: I don’t write stories, except for my own, but I love this one.
Cameron says: What I like about this is the challenge to tell a story while staying within the word count. Feel free to join in though. It might help your own writing.
(I write my own stuff as well by the way. I get your point.)
Lewis says: The lawyer finished reading the list, the cousins sat looking at him like he was nuts. $50 in the savings account, $214.27 in the checking account and knick knacks for everyone! I was watching their faces and enjoying myself no end! I was really hoping Aunt Ginny was watching, too! The gathering broke up, they walked to their cars with their knick knacks, some of them didn’t even bother getting theirs!
“So Hal, you get the World Book Encyclopedia, eh?”
I grinned, picked up the heavy cardboard boxes I’d brought and started loading them in.
“How’d you know to bring boxes?”
Again, I just grinned!
“Well, she told me she was going to leave them to me. Said the internet didn’t know everything and often got things wrong. Said I might want to look some things up if I got to wondering!”
I got the boxes into my living room, pulled the curtains shut and looked into “D” . Sure enough, skinny little volume with a hollow space full of diamonds! “C” was equally stuffed with CASH! “S” had the STOCKS and bonds, “B” had some lovely jeweled BRACELETS! Those were just the obvious ones, I couldn’t wait to look something up in every volume! Aunt Ginny was always my favorite!
Cameron says: At first, I figured that this was a punishment for wanting to live away from my folks. They would permit me to go to college here but in return, I had to live with my grandmother. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate her. But I never really talked to her all that much.
The arrangement seemed to work for us though. I was in class every day from morning until early afternoon. I helped keep things clean and we’d occasionally chat about life. I suppose the fact she made coffee strong enough to chew helped me get through the day as well.
Things got better though. She taught me how to sew, cook and even some first aid. I learned how to plant a garden and save what came out of the ground for later. And I learned how to mix drinks for her friends.
My four years at college ended sooner than I thought. Grandma smiled at me as I was getting ready to leave. When I thanked her, she waved it off. “Just keep what you learned and teach someone else is all I ask.”
My kids are in for a rough time when I have them.
Sheila Garrett says: “Your great granddad would be proud son,” Jimmy Taylor’s father said as they gazed at the freshly restored ’55 GMC pickup. Jimmy had worked all year on it as his senior project for high school shop. It was pine green and all the parts were original, as Jimmy remembered long weekends spent scrounging junk-yards. “Ready to take it out?”
“Yes Sir, I’ll take it around the back roads for awhile then get some gas before I come home.”
Two hours later Jimmy sat staring at his gas gauge. Firmly on E; he slid out to the gravel road and grabbed the gas can from the truck bed and started walking.
A half mile later he turned up a long driveway to a white clapboard farm house. He could see a tank on metal legs by the barn and hoped he could buy enough gas to get him home. But what really got his attention was the girl on the porch. Dress shoes with rhinestone buckles were propped on the seat of a wicker chair while the houndstooth skirt had fallen high up her thighs. He coughed.
Startled, she was still graceful getting to her feet. He was about to explain his presence, but she shushed him. “The Pall Mall dance program is about to start, can you dance?” She gestured to a transistor radio on the table.
“I-I guess,” he stammered. The music began, she took his hands and they danced. ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Oh Boy’, ‘Mr. Sandman’. Elvis Presley, The Silhouettes, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino.
He took in her brown gold hair, gold flecked hazel eyes, and enchanting smile. By the time The Platters played ‘Only You’, he knew she was the one. Her father came out and invited him to supper with them before they got him the gas for the truck. On the kitchen was a calendar, September 1957.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I was named for my great granddad anyway.’
Cameron says: Oh that was a good twist. Well done!
Sheila Garrett says: Thanks. I did do a little research, pop music charts and when transistor radios were a thing. Sorry I can’t stick with the word count though. I can’t figure out how to get the story from Word to the reply box, Clipboard doesn’t seem to work for me.
Cameron says: The word count is a suggestion that we sometimes ignore if the story demands it. -:-)
Odd that you’re having problems getting the story pasted. Sometimes, the site is a bit wonky. I use Libre Office, the a copy/paste from there.
The photos must’ve already been faded and yellowed when they were digitized. Sure, there are ways to correct color in software, but they’re always based upon the assumptions of the operator, so for archival documents we don’t retouch.
So sometimes we can only guess what some of them represent, and why our ancestors would’ve used valuable storage space to bring them up here when every gram of mass was precious. Like this one image of a woman’s legs propped up on an upholstered chair of a sort we only see in history vids. To look at it, one would think it was carelessly composed — yet someone considered it valuable enough to preserve.
We lost so much in those final years, as Earth turned its back on technology and on those of us who headed out to the High Frontier. For all I know, this might have been a random photograph that happened to be on a smartphone that was in the pocket of someone who got a seat on one of the last rockets out of Kennedy, before the protestors smashed through the safety barriers and destroyed the launch control centers so no more could ever go out.
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