FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us.

She shambled in and shot a sinking glance at the sleeping baby and the other small animals in our living room. My mother was late to bedded pillows last night and up early with no coffee in the morning’s gut: Unprepared, for another Monday.

The routines have become exhausted—draining body of its heart and capital. Now, both heart and capital are bent worst, upshot through a corroding-brown coated ceiling. A short stride walks my mother to her job; my father drives to his own workplace, an engineer shaking hands with (other) machines.

“We all feel programmed and sapped, but children fix this,” I hear my grandmother chop out to my father.

My mother wants life to be “new.”
My father wants it “different.”
My grandmother isn’t very happy here.

Well, not in this house, where the heating works wonders but the inside is winter wounded. No birthday balloons, more like divorce papers and wedding bands bonded very loosely. So, please mom and dad stop yelling because I can’t sink asleep, and grandma is passed out, gently styled aside her husband’s favorite flask.

back to Contest #2