Liking yourself

 My writing partner and I noticed the obese young girl strut by the tea room where we were doing our writing exercises. We always try and pick out someone a bit different to describe and to work into a flash fiction piece. This time we both wrote how happy the person appeared. However, the picture I found to illustrate this piece is no where near as fat as the one we were writing about.

Her hair was cut almost into a crew cut except for five tendrils of different lengths sticking out from different sections of the back of his head.

She decided years ago as her body expanded if she couldn’t be pretty, she’d be interesting.

Her belly jiggled under her horizontal striped shirt. Any fashion consultant would have shuddered saying how the stripes accented the fat.

Micheline would have been pleased that they, the fashion consultants that is, even thought of her.

Years ago she’d developed a strut when she walked, her head thrown back and a smile playing intermittently on her lips.

People, okay women, gravitated toward her. She’d be invited to couples parties, probably because the women didn’t see her as a threat with their men. At that thought she smiles. More than one husband had reached out to touch her breasts, probably some latent memory of mother’s milk.

Micheline didn’t mind because she knew it would go no further. They wouldn’t want to and she wouldn’t want to hurt her friends.

She glanced at her watch. She was late for work, but she’d make up the time later in the day.

God, how she loved her life.

Purple pansies

 We are definitely in pansy season. My writing friend and I chose this women to trigger our exercise because she seemed so determined as she walked up the street. However, my writing friend emphasized the heaviness of the pansies and another character in a wheel chair sneaked in. One of the beauties of doing these exercises is that the writer is often surprised where they go.

Alice carried the tray of pansies up the street. She would plant them in her “garden” which was a large purple ceramic pot outside her front door.

When she and her ex owned their house together, she had a large garden with both flowers and vegetables that she canned each fall, even though he said all that work was silly.

After her divorce she’d moved from the American Midwest to this tiny French village with streets so narrow that her ex-husband’s SUV would not be able to drive through without scraping the sides of the vehicle. The idea of his precious baby scratched made her smile.

Jared would not understand how she was happier in her one-room wide house attached on both sides to her neighbours’ homes compared to her five-bedroom home on two acres of land. The ground floor was the living room, the middle was the kitchen and dining area and the top floor was her bedroom and studio.

She’s installed skylights in the red tiled roof to give her enough light to paint. When she fell asleep at night the odor of paint and turpentine stayed in her nostrils. In the last few minutes before drifting off she would plan her the following day.

Last night her thoughts had been of purple pansies to first paint then plant. In some countries purple was the colour of mourning. For Janine it was the colour of freedom.

Condolence book

My writing friend and I are back at La Noisette to do our flash fiction exercises by identifying a person then writing for ten minutes. Sometimes we pick up the same thing. She also had the elderly woman that inspired this piece as not liking the dead person, only she made the defunct as the French call it, the wife of her lover.

Janine signed the condolence book on the gold-legged table just outside the 13th century church. The hearse hadn’t arrived, but some early funeral attendees were straggling in.

She still had trouble believing her arch enemy from grade school on was dead. Decades of animosity flowed from her pen as she signed her name. She still remembered Maria throwing paint on her new blouse, tripping her on the playground and stealing her homework.

Janine gave as good as she got. Her late husband, Jean-Luc, has been Maria’s boyfriend first  although during Janine’s marriage she wasn’t sure she hadn’t done Maria a favour by taking Jean-Luc off her hands.

Janine leaned heavily on her cane. Despite the winter sun, her arthritis was hurting today.

She hadn’t known Maria was ill, even if the lived side-by-side. Each had called the police from time to time to complain about noise coming from the other’s house. Maria had won her case with the fence argument forcing Janine to move the structure six inches back towards her property.

Janine took a minute to read the names. People could be Maria’s friend or hers, not both. However some of the names on the list were people she had thought had been on her side.

Looking up she watched the hearse park by the side of the church. Maria’s sons and sons-in-law moved to shift the coffin into the church.

The line of people waiting to sign the condolence book had grown behind Janine. 

She debated going in, but instead shuffled off to buy bread at the boulangerie.

Sin

The opening line is from Little Big Man. When my writing partner read it, I misunderstood and thought she said, "He had a wider sweeping definition of scene than my paw's." Our next session will be face to face, but Skype works really great for this. I didn't really end this piece just left it hanging because we ran out of time.

 He had a wider sweeping definition of sin that my pa's.

And my pa had a sense that was greater than any god’s.

My paw wasn’t one of those holy rollers. No siree bob. He just knew that it wasn’t right to throw trash in the neighbor’s yard, not that we had any neighbors way up here.

He’d talk about the Ten Commandments sometimes at dinner where we were made to sit and eat with good table manners, not that bad table manners were a sin. He thought treating the food that my maw had made with respect was the way to thank her.

“I don’t believe that making a graven image is a sin,” he said. Good thing too, because he carved little dolls for my sister and animals. I still have one of his bears that looked like it could climb a tree or maybe a twig, considering the size.

Now he did think that coveting thy neighbor’s wife a sin. Better to thank the Lord for what we have than worry about what the neighbor has, he'd say.

Thus when I ran into Bill who wanted everyone to fear the Lord and told them so over and over I couldn’t help but compare to my pa.

I met Bill when I’d driven the truck into town to pick up more fertilizer. Bill had taken over the store from John who’d dropped dead of a heart attack behind the counter. We were all worried about what would happen if the store closed, but in less than two weeks it was open under Bill.

“Have you given your life to Jesus?” was one of the first things Bill had asked when I went into the store for the first time.

I know my standard answer of “Maybe,” would not be well received. It was 30 miles to the next store so I didn’t want to get on the wrong side.

 Bill refused to sell anything to Fred because he had cheated on his wife or so the rumors went mostly those started by Bill. Amazing how much dirt can be passed around up here in the mountains.

My goal was to get in to the store today and out before I had to talk to Bill. If wanting to avoid being preached at is a sin, so be it.

Brat

 The quote came from Martina Cole's two women. My writing partner in Argelès said that it was cold down there as it is Geneva. However, both our Skypes worked. Her piece was about a nurse who noticed a virus in women and not men and the doctor's lack of credence.

The nurse shook her head.

The little boy just stuck his tongue out at her.

“Now Bobby,” his mother said. “We’ve discussed about how we greet people.”

Bobby stuck his tongue out at his mother and jumped off the examining table and ran to the door which had been locked. The child had been a patient there before and the staff when they examined the 

appointments list over coffee before the patient would all say “Oh no.”

“It’s not Bobby’s fault,” Louise would tell the staff. “It’s his mother’s.”

Bobby’s mother, Anita, was in her mid 30s and dressed in designer everything. Bobby was five, and Anita believed that a child’s desires should not be thwarted. Instead the child should be made to see the error of his ways. As a result, she had cancelled two earlier appointments because Bobby hadn’t wanted to come in to see the pediatrician who was still with another patient. He would knock when he was ready to see the child.

“I didn’t tell Bobby where he was going,” she’d whispered at the reception desk. And when we came up in the elevator, I told him you’d give him a lollipop.”

“We don’t give candy but crayons,” the receptionist said.

“I know, but I’ve a lollipop that I’ll sneak to the doctor to give him.”

The receptionist had been too well trained to not roll her eyes, but she knew it would make a good story to tell the staff later.

Bobby began to scream his “I wanta go home” could be heard throughout the practice and into the practice next door.

The doctor used his key to enter the room. He was old and was planning to retire next year. Already he had bought his Florida home. “That’s enough young man,” he said as he put his stethoscope on the boy's chest.

“I don’t like you,” Bobby said.

“I don’t care. I don’t like you either. Now shut up.”

The mother’s mouth fell open. She turned on her $250 pair of high heels. “No one talks to my son like that,” she said. Grabbing Bobby she made for the door. “Unlock it. I’ll find a doctor that treats my son with respect.”

The doctor unlocked the door. Her heels clicked, clicked, clicked down the hall and then the office door slammed.

The doctor looked at his nurse and had a big smile. “There’s more than one way to fire a patient.”