Tag: short short story

“I’m really proud of you.  That’s what she’ll say to me next,” I thought.  “How can that not be the next thing she says?”  I am thirteen years old and have never heard my mother say one word that could be considered positive reinforcement.  Tough love was what my mom was all about.  I knew…

Alive time.  Dead time.  Those were the words repeated to me by mother so often when we were young.  At the end of the day when she was tucking us in, we would have to tell her what we did with our time and decide whether our day was spent more alive or dead.  We…

I always wanted to go to boarding school, but now that I am here, I wondered what the hell I was thinking.  I thought it would be full of teenage drama and angst, rich kids with secret drug habits, but I was not as prepared for the level of commitment everyone had to athletics.  It completely blew my…

When I stepped into a public school for the first time, I honestly thought my head was going to explode.  There were so many people.  So many colors.  So many new noises and smells.  What had I missed in the fourteen years of my life that I am just now getting to experience this for the first time.  My…

I always wanted to live in the 1700s.  I question myself a lot about this due to the fact I am a hypochondriac and if a foreign object touches any part of my body, I am certain I am going to die.  So why I would want to live in the 1700s is beyond me.  Though I…

Growing up, I always thought of my Grandfather as the most fun (and definitely my favorite) family member.  Which is saying a lot since I grew up with dozens of cousins and second cousins who were in and out of our house constantly.  I was never in want of needing someone to play with as the house was always full of noise…

I always took the stairs to our fourth-floor apartment.  Always.  In the four years I have lived in the building, I have not once taken the elevator.  No one understands my ‘fear’ of elevators, but it is really my serious dislike of small places and the possibility of someone else being in that small space with me.  I grew up with several siblings in…

Growing up, I never thought I would be successful.  My parents managed to tell me just about every day that I would be a failure.  That I would end up just like my sister, pregnant at 16 and still without a GED.  Four years and two kids later, she’s still hanging around on the edge of…

Growing up, I never really liked to camp, but suffered through those weekends because my dad seemed so obsessed.  And it was the only time that my mom stopped drinking for part of the day.  If I had been older, I would have been drinking while we were camping and not while we were at home. …