words "meringue, traffic, flowers, social, bill"
Junk food was winning the battle.
Her cart was only half full. The bill would be more than Sarah had budgeted - again. She'd braved rush hour traffic, for easy food - frozen pre-cooked whatever - an excuse to stand in the frozen food aisle. Ice cream bars at $4.99 or chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches at $5.99? Both. And the tub of Trader Joe's Vanilla Meringues too. The plastic strip holding the lid to the tub could be moved aside. She could open it and have one. Or four - the serving size says four...
"Hi, Sarah, how are you?" Trapped with my finger in the cookie jar and wishing I had showered. "I'm fine!" She tries to position her cart for escape, but is blocked by a large stock boy building a tower of pasta boxes and organic marinara. "How's John?" "He is going to a private college in come September - they gave him a scholarship but I'm assuming it will cost at least $200,000. Lucky we have four $40,000 bonds set aside for him."
When John had turned 10, Sarah spent that afternoon at this man's home watching her own son play by himself amid a pool full of his classmates. Sarah had mistaken the older woman drying off John to be his grandmother. Stupid. It was the housekeeper.
"That's SO great!" "How's Mat doing? We lost touch when he changed schools."
It's her turn to talk. She can hear the hum of the freezers. She can smell the flowers at the front of the store. This man's home had been landscaped with roses around the pool. If Mat were here, he'd want her to get roses. Red ones with the long stems. You deserve them mom. His social worker had dropped off another painting of Mat's this morning. Red swirls of paint pushed by fingers.
Comments
I had been at Trader Joes the day before. It was HOT day. I was chilling in the frozen food. I had bought junk food. I had thought about opening the meringues when the other parent came rolling up. He told me what I wrote and my son did go to his home for a party when they were ten. My son was a loner. I did think the housekeeper was the grandmother.
But the rest was not true. It was very difficult for me to weave fiction into reality and create something completely different. Even changing names was difficult.
I spent hours writing and rewriting and then posted it feeling like I'd just lied.I'm going to need to keep doing exercises like this in the hopes I can pull myself further from my fiction.