Maybe I Should Write It As Fiction? Nah.

Here's a stab at fiction.  I wrote about two pages and then petered out.  So not a fiction writer, at least for now!.

Sunny feels she’s forever stuck in her mother’s house, ironing a shirt she hasn’t worn in over 40 years.

A threadbare shirt she’d worn as a teen, when she didn’t want to be a girl at all. When the only brand she would buy was Wranglers—blue jeans and cut-off shorts. That skinny year, when her chest was flat, her shoes mostly sneakers and hiking boots. Who would wear the shirt now? No one.

She sighed, set down the iron. Rosie was well-launched, off to Australia to teach English literature to Maori children—some kind of exchange program. Max was … well, Max was struggling. His last year of high school, with no idea what he wanted to do next: culinary arts or chiropractic or needle felting. No idea what it took to accomplish these things. Wild notions of going off to the University of Virginia or Cornell, when his ACT scores were abysmal, the tuition impossible. There was no money for experimenting. She could not afford to send him off to flounder and fail.


They’d moved back to Pennsylvania a year ago, after her mother’s death. A job had been waiting. They were desperate for RNs, thank God, especially in Psych. Plus, she loved it, those crazy teens—with their certainty that they were doomed to live in their formless selves forever, afraid to grow breasts, grow up, take on responsibility, take on the world.

Depressed and anxious and cutting and addicted and lonely. These are the hearts that reached out to her day after day. That she greeted with kindness and respect. They clung to her, thirsty as flowers.

She knew she had to let him go. He could take care of himself (she tried to believe it). He was too good at reaching out for help: his friends had carried him through high school, even through PSEO. He still refused to use text-to-speech software. Instead he took classes like sculpture and American Sign Language, which required no reading and writing at all .... .