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
Fiction
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
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
Morning Miniature 9.20.19
Lucy Ratcliffe could read by age four, and by six had ripped through all the books that interested her in the children’s corner at the neighborhood public library, even some that did not, and a great many of them time and again. At eight she consumed any piece of literature that crossed her path, and … Continue reading Morning Miniature 9.20.19
Morning Miniature 9.13.19
Claudia Freeman married young and resigned herself to a life of child rearing and servitude. She was a buxom woman by her late thirties, not at all corpulent, and her hands by then already betrayed expertise in occupations domestic and horticultural. She could remove a sheet pan from a hot oven with a threadbare mitt … Continue reading Morning Miniature 9.13.19
