The Birthday Pary

Daily Flash Fiction 8/19/11
Write a story using the following words: clock, rope, notebook

My Birthday Party

         Nine-Eleven, I am twenty-one, I can smoke and drink and go with whom every I want.  My mom and dad promised me a car on my twenty-first birthday. 

         Mom bought a black forest cake, my favorite.  She covered the table with a white linen tablecloth, put out the fine china plates, crystal glasses and silverware. 

         It’s nine o’clock in the morning and she sits at the empty table, running her fingers through her curly gray hair, her eyes fixed on the clock on the sideboard.

         Her attention turns to the hall closet; she gets up and opens the door.  She reaches down into a canvas bag.  The firemen’s helmet is badly dented and the plastic liner has been removed.  Mom places the dusty helmet on the chair at the end of the table.  She returns to the closet and retrieves a lightly singed notebook.  She has repeated this ritual for the past nine years. 

         I look over her shoulder as she sits and stares into space.  I whisper in her ear my undying love for her and dad; but she does not hear.  She opens the notebook and reads ‘Lydia sixth grade’.  She looks at my math homework and smiles at the high grade points in the margins of the pages.

         To this day I feel my heart aching in my chest, the lump in my throat, that I can’t comfort her or hold her hand.  I watch her pour out her pills, she carefully places them end to end along the edge of the table; thirty pills. 

         “NO!” I scream as loud as I can in her ear, and she stares down at that rope of pills decorating the edge of the table.  With shaking hands she puts them back in the bottle.

Word Count = 294