2024 February Flash Fiction Challenge: Day 22
Have you ever heard of WD’s Your Story competition? This is a free-to-enter competition run in the magazine where the winners get their story published in a future issue of WD! Each issue, I provide an image and writers submit their stories to be considered.
I’ve taken inspiration from our 650-word Your Story competition. For today’s prompt, rite a story of 650 words or fewer based on this image:
Remember: These prompts are just starting points; you have the freedom to go wherever your flash of inspiration takes you.
(Note: If you run into any issues with posting your story, please just send me an e-mail at mrichard@aimmedia.com with the subject line: Flash Fiction Challenge Commenting Issue.)
Here’s my attempt at a story based on the image above:
The Shoebox
Tucked away in the very back of the hallway closet—buried under ancient versions of Monopoly and Uno, mismatched shoes, and abandoned crafts—was the shoebox. It was flimsy in the corners, sagging in the middle with age (aren’t we all?), colors faded. Margot pulled it into her lap, her mind 2,000 miles away with her wife and daughter. They’d flown back after the funeral, not wanting Millie to miss more school than absolutely necessary. Routine was important after a loss, even if Millie had hardly known her grandmother.
When she pulled the lid off and started sifting through the items, it took her a minute to comprehend what she was looking at. She picked up the bundle of Polaroids held together by a cracked rubber band. In one, a sunny day at a beach, a colorful umbrella off-center, and the glinting waves in the background. In another, chickens picking through gravel. Margot studies the faded colors that make up each image. Then one that stops her—one of her.
Wait. No. She never wore a flower crown like that, couldn’t remember a time when she lay sprawled among long grasses, an indulgent and coy smile across her mouth. In the corner was a date—April 2, 1962—and the words “My angel.”
It was her mother.
Margot flipped to the next image. Same flower crown, same grass. This time, her mother lay topless with a joint held to her mouth. One arm was folded behind her head, relaxed. Her eyes pierced the viewer, almost a dare. In the corner—“My little devil.”
Margot put the image down. She picked it up. She tossed it down again. Her mother was nude for God’s sakes! There was no reason she should want to look at it.
And yet.
The young woman in the photo was years away from the man who would take her to bed and then disappear at the first sign of a pregnancy…of Margot. She did not yet understand the exhaustion of sleepless nights with a colicky baby after long, grueling hours waitressing at the local diner. She certainly didn’t know the solace she would find in weekly pilgrimages to church, the way it would wound the love between her and her daughter that wouldn’t have a chance to heal. She certainly couldn’t imagine an early and lonely death, a heart attack in the shower getting ready for a shift.
She told Sam about the box while curled up on the couch with a glass of wine.
Sam got a kick out of it. “No wonder she was so religious. The free-and-wild life didn’t work out super well for her.”
“I guess! But you’d think if she was some free-wheeling hippy, she’d be less traumatized by a gay kid,” Margot said.
“She was a whole person.” Sam’s voice was soft with love. “Someone maybe you never had the opportunity know.”
A whole person. It rang in Margot’s head as she lay on the double bed in her mom’s room, listening to the sounds of the apartment building that her mother must have listened to every night.
Slowly, that person revealed herself. A dried bundle of flowers pressed in the pages of a bell hooks book. A few Post-it Notes with little lines of poetry scrawled across them. A saucy letter dated a year after those photographs were taken, signed “Yours always, Michael.” The only Michael she’d ever known in her mother’s life was the super at their old apartment building, who was about 80 years old and could barely climb the stairs.
Who were you, really? she found herself asking over and over. Who were you before me?
There was no one to answer her. Only the ghost of her mother’s laughter, memories she had to unpack and reframe, the shadow of a woman who was also a mom, who was doing the best she was capable of.