Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Reminisce Part 1

Thursday afternoons were invented to be the most god-awful day in existence. Sure, people have their gripes about Mondays rolling around and stealing the weekend away, but at least they have a Sunday behind them. All that's behind Thursday is Wednesday, and that isn’t much to talk about. The torture that is caused by the looming prospect that Friday is the next day borders on unbearable when sitting at home and typing an essay on a book that was surely written just to give English teachers an excuse to hand out writing assignments. I was sure that Shakespeare had been a great guy in his time, but after Romeo and Juliet, and now Julius Caesar, he was quickly rising on my list of people whom I wish had never existed, right up there with the creators of Algebra. Maybe it was just my attitude taking a turn for the worst, but after a thousand or so words, I decided that I’d hit my limit. I reached down to turn the little clock on my desk around, and saw a red 11:37 P.M. blinking back at me. I let out a little sigh, and then hit the print button before shutting down the laptop completely. From my desk chair, I just leaned over to my bed and rolled up to the pillows, where I promptly buried my face. Reaching back to pull out a hair tie with one hand, I took my free hand and brought the covers up to me. This April hadn’t been especially cold, so the only things on the bed were one white sheet and a blue quilt that had been my bedtime buddy for as long as I could remember. Regardless of the temperature, I lifted the quilt up to my neck, and quickly let my grogginess take over.

Tomorrow, I wouldn’t be cooped up in the house writing some silly essay, I could go out to town and take it in until the sun set. Maybe I’d try to find a new outfit to buy, or stuff myself at the pizza place; but whatever I decided to do, Friday night was the time to do it. What a great feeling it is to put off all of the weekends homework until Sunday night, and just enjoy life like a normal human being! Maybe I’d go see a movie with some friends, or even meet someone who could sweep me off my feet...the possibilities were endless. All I had to do was get through one more day of school, and then temporary freedom would be mine for the taking...

“Colette, dear, are you still up?” I heard my mom call from the living room.

I kicked the covers off and got up out of bed to see what disaster my mother had brought on upon herself tonight. She seemed to be a magnet for bad luck, and it never failed to amaze me that so many simple things in the world could be such a hazard. (Well, maybe she was the hazard to those objects, but whatever.) I walked down the hall and found her sitting at the table with the sewing machine, working on making a new sweater. Why she was sewing a sweater right before summer rolled around, I had no idea.

“Mom, let me guess.” I said sarcastically. “You sewed yourself to something?”

“What!” she exclaimed. “How did you know?”

I sighed softly, and smiled a little for the fact that I knew my mothers streak of random accidents well enough to guess what had happened on the first try. I walked back into my room and returned with a pair of scissors to free my mother from the black line of thread she had attached to her blue blouse from the sweater she was working on.

“Oh, thank you, Colette.” she said, relieved. “I’m glad you were still up, otherwise I would have been stuck here all night...”

“You could always have just slipped out of it and changed into something else.” I told her. Aside from being a walking disaster, she wasn’t exactly brightest of the bunch either. I supposed I should have been grateful that it wasn’t her finger she sewed to something.

She looked back at me blankly for a moment, mulling over what I had just said, before smiling back and planting a kiss on the top of my head.

“Of course, of course!” she stammered out. “I guess I’m just so used to you helping me with these types of things, I just called you first without thinking it through.” She was right too. I’d saved her from lighting her hair on fire at my last birthday party while trying to light the candles, prevented her from electrocuting herself trying to plug in a toaster to an outlet after spilling water on it, and saved her from ordering a new dessert from her favorite restaurant without realizing it came with nuts, which she's deathly allergic to.

It was hard believe that I looked so much alike to this danger prone woman. We both had the same gold streaked brown hair, though mine to fell to my shoulders and hers was cut up to her neckline. Our statures were shaping up to be somewhat similar, with both of us being slim and not too tall; about five and a half feet. The only contrast between us were our eyes. My mother’s were brown, while mine were more of a hazel color. She had told me that they were the same color of my father’s, whom I had no real recollection of. He had died soon after I was born, my mom had told me. Sometimes I wondered if this constant string of bad luck was really just her trying too hard to make life good for me as a single parent. I may joke about her being a ditz a lot, but I really did love her for all of the effort she put out for my sake.

I hugged her goodnight and marched back off into my bedroom, where I didn’t bother getting under the covers again. Diving into my pillows and sprawling out seemed like a better idea than going through the effort of moving around too much, and my body apparently agreed as I lost consciousness. My eyes were really heavy after staring at the bright computer screen for so long, so the least I could do was give myself a good sleep.

I don't often remember my dreams when I wake up. However, when you have a dream that feels so real that you wake up drenched in sweat, that generally means you'll have an easier time recalling it.

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