Morning all, hope your week started out well. Mine has had some unintended interruptions, but otherwise is going well. I am still updating covers and refreshing manuscripts to get the new website ready. It is going to be more for my writing while this stays as more writing exercises. Not that I don’t write on the exercises, but you know what i mean. For now, lets just jump into the the morning prompt.
Not sure where I am going with this but it feels more like a vignette than a story.
Tuesday, April 22nd: Fish darted about in the shallows.
Fish darted about in he shadows. They were little slivers of sliver, lightning in the clear water of the pond. There were small plants on the bottom but they were in small clusters and seemed inclined to be short things rather than produce long waving fronts. Sand and pebbles coated most of the river’s base and it looked to Leia as though it was a life sized fish bowl, the product of man rather than nature. Nature she noticed tended to be a bit messier.
She stared at the little silver flashes. She wished her own mind would get it’s own flashes of insight. She had been out here an hour, sitting and thinking and trying to come up with some decisions, or answers or options., something besides the constantly recurring phrase ‘What a mess.’
What a mess did seem to cover it though, even if Leia had to admit it wasn’t very helpful. Dan was taking a job out of state and wanted her to move with him. Her parents wanted her to take over the family business. Her aunts wanted her to take over their mother.
‘Well not actually occupying her,’ Leia amended, Even her aunts wouldn’t go that far. They wanted her to move in with her grandmother and be a live in caretaker for her as well as take care of the house. There was some hinting about that in her spare time, when care giver duties were not needed she could put her handy man type skills to work around the house so that when her grandmother passed, they could sell the house as recently remodeled.
Leia wasn’t entirely certain what handy man like skills they thought she had. When the chain in the flushing mechanism of the commode broke, she took off the lid and re-hooked the chain that came loose. She had on occasion also managed to pull a screwdriver out of the junk drawer and tighten a loose screw on a drawer pull. That was the height of her handy skills and she knew she wasn’t going to be remodeling the house even if there wasn’t an elderly woman to take care of.
‘Not that there is an elderly woman to take care of,’ Leia thought. Her grandmother decided to take care of herself. She found herself a room at a retirement village with her friends. She had already talked to a realtor about listing the place and planned to sell the house and do a bit of traveling before she decided she no longer wanted to.
Leia thought she mostly wanted to get away from her aunts.
‘Grandma hasn’t told them that yet,’ she thought. So her Aunts were still pushing the move in with Gran angle.
‘And then there is the job.’ She had been applying to multiple jobs that fit her skills and her degree and she had not paid too much attention to where they were. The jobs were scattered around the country and she thought it would just be interesting to see what she got. Two of the applications netted interviews and one had even called her for a second interview. They did well enough that they offered her the job.
Leia lay down and realized she hadn’t really thought through anything because she knew she wanted to take the job. She didn’t think she could just settle up and walk out like her gran, but she knew there were going to be a lot of disappointed people.
‘And none of them take disappointment well.’
She knew all of them were waiting for her to decide their offer was the one she would accept and then they would crow over the others. Then the cajoling would begin as those she didn’t choose would try to get her to change her mind. She wasn’t sure how they would react if none of them were chosen.
Ten til Midnight 