2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
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2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
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“Words to Live By” (Fiction)

So I thought I would post another piece of fiction, to prove that I actually do write fiction some of the time… (teehee) Seriously, I have been surprised at how much I enjoy the flash fiction/short story genre in my own writing. I have a lot of ideas percolating in my head (oh, the things in my head are ALWAYS percolating – it’s a pretty interesting and simultaneously odd place, my head…) and when I sit down to think through some of them, they just seem to not need as many words as I originally thought. This means I get to write in many different voices and sub-genres regularly – which is both fun and good practice (it seems to me). So don’t be surprised if you see more fiction in the coming posts. I hope you enjoy today’s piece – it all started with the first quote (which is an actual, honest-to-god quote from my very own grandmother, teehee), and kind of developed on its own from there. That is, perhaps, my favorite thing about writing fiction – the way ideas and words take on a life of their own once they move out of your head and onto the page…
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Words to Live By

“You never get a headache from Scotch.”

My gravelly-voiced grandmother’s words still echo in my mind, years later. Advice was the most valuable thing that woman ever gave me. Well, maybe the second most valuable – she swore that ugly-ass vase she gave me when was cleaning out the basement was leaded crystal, and I hear that stuff sells like crazy on eBay. But I hear it’s a hassle selling stuff there. So I guess I’m back to the words. As for the Scotch, well, she would know. She drank the stuff like it was going out of style.

“Menthols clear you out. It’s like inhaling gasoline – lights a fire in your lungs and you just hack everything up and go on your way.”

She would sit there, dragging deep on menthol cigarettes, pulling great lung-bucketsful of exhaust-pipe fumes into what must have surely been the blackest, most shriveled lungs in the history of smoking, knocking back glass after glass, usually accompanied by a giant plate of deep fried something (it never seemed to matter what – meat, potatoes, even sometimes vegetables; as long as it was fried it was okay by her). I always imagined her internal organs engaged in a furious battle of wills – lungs, liver, throat, arteries, heart each refusing to give in to the inevitable, refusing to be the sad pathetic loser that gave out first.

“Life isn’t a damn card trick. You can’t lose focus, not even for a second, without losing big.”

Even now I wonder how she lived as long as she did. Why her body never gave up, gave out. How no one around her ever managed to garner even the slightest proximate benefit from her longevity. Whether she actually was fueled by liquor and smokes – some sort of bizarre human-hybrid that learned the secret to eternal life and then smuggled it away, parsing out dribs and drabs of the secret to a worthy few on rare occasions for inexplicable reasons.

“The truth never set anything free – at least not anything good.”

I went to live with her the year I turned seven. The year of Very Bad Things – of tears in school, blood on the road, and malicious whispers. The year I learned that “nice” girls are the meanest kind of all, that no one feels sorry for the kid of the drunk driver, that tiny pinches hurt, that telling yourself the enough lies eventually makes you forget the truth. The year she started giving me words to live by.

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