When I Am An Old Woman_Come into the Light_The Cutout on the Wall_Standing Up
Catalog Guide:
When I Am An Old Woman
When I Am An Old WomanDoris and I are having a bit of a tiff.She’s very polite at first, asking me to come in for coffee.I help by carrying the cups, while she reaches for a swirly glass bowl filled with cookies. The style looks like it came from Murano.“Have a seat,” she invites, indicating a Louis XVI chair upholstered with smoky blue brocade.“Oof!” I exclaim involuntarily. The chair is uncomfortable. Its pretty oval back is a smidge too convex, preventing me from leaning back. The seat is hard, and too shallow.“Something wrong, dear?”I squirm a little.“It's the chair, isn't it? I wanted you...
Come into the Light
Kyra swallowed a mouthful of coffee, hiding her grimace with the newspaper. Why anyone drinks this stuff when it tastes like soap and burnt toast was beyond her. Still, she would make herself finish the entire cup; it’s what an adult would do. And Kyra, having turned 14 a week ago and due for her freshman year of high school in exactly one month, decided that the only way to prepare herself for the next stage in life was to do everything her mother (a real adult) would do.Every Sunday, Kyra’s mother woke up at 6a.m. for no good reason, poured herself a cup of soap, and kicked back with...
The Cutout on the Wall
The first ever review of my restaurant still hangs on the kitchen wall, a little crooked, right inside the entrance. I can look at it every time I come to work. In fact, it’s hard not to look at it. I made sure it’s as in your face as possible when you walk in the kitchen doorway, the heading leaping at your eyes right after the smells of the day’s cooking flood into your nose. It hangs on a small plastic hook in a cwww.onedoor.ccheap wooden frame. The ink has faded slightly since the day I cut it out from the local newspaper, but I can still read it, I can still see the rating. One star. I can also see my ...
Standing Up
Apollo stumbled into the nurse’s office right around lunch time, where he usually ended up every day. “Again?” questioned Floria, the school nurse.“Yeah,” breathed Apollo.Blood was gushing from his nose, and he looked like an alien with the amount of bruises on his body. “You really need to start standing up for yourself, or you know Marcus and his gang will keep beating you up!”Marcus Freerider was the school bully, and he took great satisfaction in pushing around Apollo, to the point of bleeding and bruising at some points. “They’d beat me up anyway, knowing them,” he said. As Floria cleane...