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For Story A Day May, Day Six (click the heading to see the full post with prompt by writer, writing coach, and international speaker Angela Ackerman).
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This story is the sixth in a series of explorations for my upcoming novel, Still Nameless (Kifo Island #8), which I will be drafting in July.
Interrupted Trip
Marilyn feels like she’s melting into the couch again – but she doesn’t want to be the couch, or have the couch be her, either, right now.
What she wants is a cigarette.
But damned Anna the cook thinks she runs the entire house, and she can smell smoke miles away. There’s nowhere inside where she won’t smell it, and it doesn’t even matter if Marilyn smokes cloves instead of tobacco.
She’s tried vaping, but it doesn’t work for her. The cold hard metal interrupts her trip. That’s no good – she can’t always find a guy to let her pay him for what she wants in sex. When she can, she doesn’t want to waste the high.
But today – today she’s got enough for a week’s worth of good trips, more if she’s careful. And she’s got a pack of cloves – if she smokes them outside, Anna will be none the wiser, and she’ll be able to pretend she’s in a Madagascar market or something else that’s exotic.
Somewhere – anywhere! – that’s not here.
Here, with a mother who wants nothing to do with her, because, “You remind me of that ass I married, who thought tropical waters were just fine to take a dip into.”
She wished Mom wouldn’t talk like that, when she was little. But, now – now that she’s growing up, Mom says she looks just like her damned father, sounds just like her damned father.
How is she supposed to not be like a father she can’t remember even ever having seen? A father who was gone out of her life before she was three years old?
Damn. She doesn’t want to think about that anymore.
She takes another hit, and heads to the front door. It’s going to be a great trip – a better than great trip. A damned vacation, right there in her own head, without ever living this damned house that Mom forbid her to leave.
She takes a deep breath, imagining she’s already filling her lungs with sweet clove smoke. It’s going to be a fantastic, one-of-a-kind trip.
Marilyn opens the door halfway, and it catches on something and won’t go further. She stares down. For a moment, she doesn’t understand. Her brain is ready for a trip, and it doesn’t include the dead body of her mother.
That’s an interruption her trip can’t recover from.
Has Marilyn really found her mother’s body?
Is this part of the trip?
Why was she forbidden to leave the house?
Any guesses?
Come back tomorrow for another installment, and we can explore this new story seed together!
