However pointless Cessily deemed fussing over an empty house, mopping and dusting rooms missing their people, making and remaking already made up beds, she remained as grateful for the work. She could hear her elder coworkers in the butler’s pantry, a man and woman in servitude to this family long before Cessily arrived there. On … Continue reading Fresh Fiction: Monday Afternoon Miniature
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Sunday Journal Entry: Staying True to Intentions
Sunday, February 9th, 2020, and we’ve settled into mid-winter in Vermont, the moment when Christmas 2019 is already a distant memory, but the first tender shoots poking up through the earth are still weeks or even months away, never mind the vernal equinox: We’re on our own time up here. Somebody warned me about long … Continue reading Sunday Journal Entry: Staying True to Intentions
Fresh Fiction: Sunday Afternoon Miniature
The familiar smell of wax served only to underscore the injustice of the situation: However firmly the child attempted to clutch a crayon between her tiny thumb and the two fingers next to it, her painfully swollen metacarpals, their distal joints no longer even discernible through the swelling, protested loudly, and her elbow wailed in … Continue reading Fresh Fiction: Sunday Afternoon Miniature
Journal Entry: A Holiday Reflection
Today is my last ‘official’ day off in a week with a couple of holidays plunked smack into the middle of it, courtesy of our Gregorian calendar. I exercised a little opportunism, nudging some unclaimed vacation time around what was already coming, like a pair of bookends. There is still the weekend ahead, which will … Continue reading Journal Entry: A Holiday Reflection
Morning Miniature 12.7.19
Cessily stood resolute on the bluff, arms folded and her brows stitched together above a pair of angry green eyes that favored her mother’s; the pinafore she wore over her dress billowed a little in the breeze, which was not strong enough to carry aloft her self-pity. Inside the house she could hear her brother … Continue reading Morning Miniature 12.7.19
Morning Miniature 11.9.19
The fickle wind lashed angrily around Lucy’s head, this way and now that. It whipped the loose locks of her ebony hair indiscriminately, the balance of them plastered to her cheeks and temples. The rain came down sideways, and hard, and she squinted to keep it from pelting her in the eyes. She raced into … Continue reading Morning Miniature 11.9.19
Morning Miniature 11.2.19
Cecil Freeman was born that way, which is to say a free man; his father Jack was not, but had taken ‘Freeman’ on the day of his emancipation, the same way one might grasp a peach tree branch, and bending it down low, pluck a ripened globe from it. Freeman was a familiar surname for … Continue reading Morning Miniature 11.2.19
Morning Miniature 10.21.19
It had taken the contractors no fewer than two months to yank down the false ceiling in the Philco-Your-Better-Buy building, remove the dingy sheetrock still clinging to its walls, and render the space ‘broom clean’ as they liked to say in the industry. It wasn’t saying much in this case, but the message Lucy had … Continue reading Morning Miniature 10.21.19
Morning Miniature 10.11.19
Cessily had spent the better part of the sunny afternoon pestering her mother like a bothersome gnat, in spite of Claudia’s urging the child to go outside and help her father with chores, or to entertain her brother with a game. But she had a cast-iron will and was not easily dissuaded from this stubborn … Continue reading Morning Miniature 10.11.19
Morning Miniature 9.27.19
Lucy whipped her VW into a parallel space and killed the engine, but left the radio on to hear the last of a Mamas and Papas standard she loved; she didn’t see the realtor anywhere and the building was still dark inside, so she unbuckled herself, and wrapping her arms around the steering wheel, craned … Continue reading Morning Miniature 9.27.19
