Ring Stories

Writing competition

My boyfriend Ransom sent me a link to a Reader's Digest writing competition and I already entered it.  The rules are life in 150 words.  It is very challenging.  He sent me this link: Your Life: The Reader's Digest Version The venerable magazine is willing to shell out $25,000 if you can keep "The Story of You" to a crisp and compelling 150 words.  Do you want to post them on Invisible Women?  Then we could work on each other's lives.

Barbara

Belen

Sarah

Something to read--think of a name for it.

            Eva wouldn’t cooperate even on the cottage cheese, no, she had to have pineapple too, and she wouldn’t eat her asparagus and wouldn’t even try the what? cutlet? all nicely breaded and mm-mmm brown.  Ellen smiled falsely at her ancient mother and dealt with her.  Her mother remembered dealing with HER mother and saw the tight straight slight upturned corner of her daughter’s mouth, and remembered making it. 

            “Okay, I’d like some meat please,” she consoled her Ellen.  “I love you so much.”  Ellen was slightly surprised. What was this tack?  

            “Well I love you too, Mom,” She fed her mom a bite of what? cutlet?  “The food’s pretty good here eh?”  Her mother rolled her eyes to the far upper right, looking for an angel. 

            “Ehh.”  Ellen was prim.

            “Well, mom, you gotta eat.  Look, here’s a nice cookie.”  Her mother worked the bite to the front of her mouth and took it in her fingers and studied it.  “Mom, I’m going down to find you something else.”  She found the “Commons” and the administrators were all circled around a corner table drinking coffee and holding prolonged discussions, while a few of the very slow older eaters continued to sit sparely at several of the tables.  The steam was being let out of the kitchen and the wait staff avoided her.  She followed a girl with a rectangular bin of dishes toward the kitchen, but the girl did not stop.  “Hello!” she called.  A tall thin youth looked at her through open double doors in the back and returned to washing dishes.  She called out again, “Hello!” The girl came back out and smiled falsely at Ellen.  “Hi, My mom is having trouble eating the cutlet and I was wondering—“

            “The what?”

            “Cutlet?  The meat thing?  She can’t eat it, and I was wondering if there’s anything else I can give her.”  She smiled at the girl.  The girl dealt with the woman.

            “The fish is all gone,” she explained.  “Do you think she would like a protein shake?  They’re real good.”

            “Is it cold?  Because she can’t handle anything too cold.  Her teeth.”

            “Oh, no they’re not too cold.  They’re just thick milk.  Lots of the seniors, that’s all they eat.  They’re real nutritious and all.”  Ellen looked doubtful. “Who’s your mom?”

            “Eva Knutson.”   The girl’s lips straightened and the corner of her mouth turned up.

            “Eva likes doughnuts,” she assured Ellen.  “When they get hungry, they’ll eat.”  She pointed to a plastic bin by the coffee service with a few pershings still in it.  Upstairs, her mother threw it on the floor and looked again for the angel. 

            “Look mom, I gotta go.  I’ll bring you something from home—when I come back, Okay?  I love you, Mom.  You want to watch a movie?”

            While Ellen drove home, her daughter called her to borrow her big punch bowl and extra chairs for some scouting event she was putting together that weekend and Ellen told her about her grandmother.  “I’ve got to take her home.  I’ve got to get her out of there.  She can’t even eat the food!”  In the silence, Ellen could hear her daughter’s lip straightening and the edge of her mouth go up.

            “Now, Mom,” she began.

Welcome

Please post what you are working on, and expect respectful if slightly tart comments designed solely to improve fiction.