Preface: I'm currently taking a GrubStreet course called 6 weeks, 6 stories. We write a short story each week depending on what we studied. Our first prompt was about building a character, which I tried below.
Daddy never let the yard get messy until mommy died. Our house is in Pennsylvania, right in the middle of it. My daddy has a joke that he tells when people ask us where we’re from.
"Well," he says, "in Pennsylvania, there's Pittsburgh, then there's Philadelphia, and it's Alabama between." At that point, he would wrap one arm around mom's slender shoulders and finish the joke, "So you could say we're from 'Bama."
When mommy was sick she liked to sit out on the front porch most of the time. She said the fresh air made her feel better. While she sat, me and Maya would grab a stick and draw a hopscotch court in the dirt while daddy pruned the trees. Mommy smiled when she watched us play, so we played a lot. One thing that scared me was how white her skin was getting. It looked so white next to our santa-red front door.
I don't like to remember the day she died, but I do. And I guess I always will. All YOU need to know is that she died quietly--no screaming or blood like I've seen in some movies. It wasn’t that much different than watching her fall asleep. My daddy said it was something to do with her lungs. Something from the cigarettes she carried with her everywhere. After she died I took her last pack of cigarettes and flushed them all down the toilet. The insides swirled but stayed floating at the top like fish food. I screamed at them to go away.
We couldn't sleep for a while after mommy died. Maya and I would walk into daddy's dark room and crawl into his bed and kiss his cheeks. They always tasted like salt. The house seemed so dark for a while. Maybe because Mommy was always the one to open the curtains in the morning. Sometimes, Maya and I would go outside to play hopscotch. It didn't feel the same because the trees looked ugly and the chair that mommy used to sit in was so empty.
It was really Maya that got daddy back out into the yard. She was outside collecting rocks and a squirrel jumped out of the messy bushes and bit her. She sat in a cloud of dust and cried and bled. My daddy ran out and cleaned her cut up. I helped as best I could, like mom would, tying my hair back into a ponytail like mom did. Except I didn't really know how to tie it back and I ripped out some strands of hair but I didn't even cry.
After that, my daddy was out in the yard everyday. It was calming to see it get cleaner. But it was nicer still to watch his smile return at the end of a hard day. Eventually, that smile wrinkled his whole face like it used to, and Maya and I smiled back with tired eyes.
