Pure Fiction

Clara studied her only daughter’s face.

Emma was lit up from the inside, delicate features a dynamic play of barely-contained emotion. It was like watching a still pool of pure, clear water breaking into soft ripples of movement. Unconstrained and uncontainable. Like the only thing keeping her together was her rose-tinted skin.

Her girl was in love.

Clara’s eyes turned to the young man seated at her daughter’s right. This stiff and stalwart-looking individual with his mortician’s hands and his thin, aesthetic face. Could her daughter – hers and Reggie’s – possibly have made this colossal a . . . mistake?

She turned toward the stage, where Reggie and his troupe were just finishing up their 9:00 set. What would her husband’s reaction be? Would he treat this proposed addition to their little family with courtesy? Or, more probably, would he rear back at the unintentioned insult and explode in artistically unsuppressed emotion. Then drag what could have been their future son-in-law out to the blacktop and toss him into the first available taxi bound for Timbuktu?

She sighed again as her daughter chattered endlessly, ceaselessly, enthusiastically on. Should she say something? Try to turn this particular ship before it hit the great reef looming before them? Should she interfere?

She tuned in to what Emma was saying. “. . . and I was so excited when I met Alphonse.” She linked hands with the sober young man beside her. “He loves jazz! Why he listens to it every day in the mortuary! He is exactly what Daddy told me to look for in a husband!”

Clara put out a hand and touched her daughter’s shoulder gently. “Oh, honey,” she said. She glanced down at the musicians on the stage. Heard the smooth, perfect notes of ‘Take Five’ pouring from Reggie’s Sax and sighed. Then she turned back to her daughter. “Honey, what your father told you to bring home was a Jazz MUSICIAN!”

Every week, Delores of Under the Porch Light doles out a challenge.

Six words. Use them. 

These are last week's words because I'm just that far behind.

insulted, blacktop, mortician, jazz, dynamic, interfere      

Drop by and see what the others of her faithful band of misfits have come up with . . .                                            

Miss-Taken Identity

Who wouldn't want to be HER grandma?!

I was waiting in the doctor’s office for an appointment.

I had four children.

And with cuts, bumps and ‘whatever was going around at the moment’ tended to spend a lot of time there.

My youngest wasn’t feeling well.

We had assumed our usual location in the large room.

My daughter was happily seated in her stroller, watching the other people in the room.

I was engrossed in a four-years-old copy of Time magazine.

Funny how the headlines and concerns of that day looked almost comical four years hence.

But I digress . . .

A woman entered the room and took a seat nearby.

A well-dressed, exquisitely-groomed, obviously prosperous woman in her mid-forties.

My daughter looked at her. “Grandma!” she crowed happily.
She loved her grandma.

I smiled. The woman did have the same hair-colour.

To us it was a title of honour.

Obviously, our opinion wasn’t shared by the whole audience . . .

The woman glanced over at us.

Then, realizing that the little girl was actually speaking to her, her expression of well-bred hauteur changed.

To one of absolute horror.

She got huffily to her feet and glared at me. “I AM NOT A GRANDMA!” she announced.

Loudly.

I stared back. What do you say to that?

“Umm . . . she has a really young Grandma,” I stuttered lamely.

It was all I could think of.

“Humph!” the woman said and, turning, stomped to a different part of the room and out of our sight.

But my daughter wasn’t done. “Where Grandma go?” she asked plaintively. “Grandma!”

Yikes.

I’ve waited for doctor’s appointments.

Sometimes for as long as a couple of hours.

None were as long as this one.