A Joint Decision: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

He had stocked his mind with feelings where thoughts used to be. Feelings of disrepute; of insanity; of calamity and disaster. That is what writers do, of course, but she was still looking at him and he knew he had to say something. The cadence of their dialogue, perfect or otherwise, had silenced moments ago and a new sound - the sound of vacuous trepidation - had solidified around them, encasing them in that too-common atmosphere known by the youth of today as 'awkwardness'. Her stare was invasive, but he could forgive that. She was allowed to invade his mind because she was the one who created it - created, naturally, using leaves and stems and bits of broken bark.


Breaking the traditions that his relationship had taught him, he spoke first.


"We can never grow if we don't leave, Lucy. We'll just stand here, stagnant, waiting for the world to come to us. Your choices - your desires have made us this way; stuck with nowhere to go. The world waits for no-one, Lucy, and no-one waits for us. Haven't you seen how our friends surpass us? Haven't you seen how they move on to better things and we just stay here - stuck - just fucking stuck, going nowhere but down. I know that you struggle with change; I know that you're happy living the easy life, but there is so much more out there. We only get one chance at this - if we don't go now, we'll never go and we don't have an excuse anymore."


"Can I talk now?" came the interception.


"We don't have an excuse because we're stifling ourselves. We are giving up on living just to survive a little longer."


"Can I talk now?" the voice came again, with authority this time.


"These are decisions that we should make together; I refuse to remain content while you dictate my chances. I don't think I can do this anymore."


Assuming that meant no, she stood and took up her suitcase in her hand. In her other hand, he was astonished to see she carried a train ticket to the capital, where a new phase of her new life could begin.

Home: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

Outside of her house was dismal. The edges of her garden were marked and plotted by trees - trees waving in the heavy gales, clawing at the sky with their extremities. She looked up from her coffee cup and began to wonder secret thoughts to herself when she heard a noise coming from the kitchen arch. Her thoughts, clandestine from all in her surroundings, were forced to surrender her attention for reality. A large, jovial woman had grounded herself in the doorway like a female Falstaff. The new figure offered a "good morning" to her mother and sat on the opposite side of the kitchen table, pouring some nonsense about the weather over breakfast. It was as if the air she expelled included a bit too much oxygen and was slightly too faint of the other chemical elements that could have made the mixture interesting.


She had refused to move away from home, claiming it to be too expensive, and proceeded to live in the biggest room of the house. Well, she was still young after all, and her mother didn't need so much space in her old age. Old people seldom need things that young people do. When a person reaches a certain age, they appear to give up a life of ambition for a life of reality. Besides, her mother always knew that she would move out when she could find a man to take her, but as the years rolled on, it was looking less and less likely to be a probable scenario. The women, though a generation apart, were growing old together at quite the same rate, it seemed, and they had become something of an indivisible force, prone only to give each other love and hold everybody else at a safe, dispassionate distance.


The house still felt empty to her since George died. Her daughter was more than adequate company, but there was always this voice in her head suggesting that she was a burden in her old age. "Perhaps she hasn't moved out because of me," she would often consider when alone with her secret thoughts, but it was unlikely. She had merely raised a young woman with enough confidence and little enough pride that she was able to stay in any living situation that made her happy, that's all. Her secret thoughts would wander down the most horrific avenues sometimes, but she often found she could resolve all else by telling herself that she was - that she is - a good mother. Her daughter, though unsuccessful, was happy; though overweight, was appreciative; though dreary, was good-natured, and that was all that really mattered.


There was a certain beauty, she always knew, in her relationship with her daughter. Though happiness can rarely be found in others, it can become apparent in their presence. Therefore, seeing her fat face chomp down mercilessly upon an unsuspecting croissant with no reservation whatsoever made her grin to the point that her thin, stick-like lips and her crow's feet became one; each indistinguishable from the other.


"Your father would be so proud of you," the mother remarked with her usual grace and reverence. Then she stood up out of her chair and walked, lightly humming, to the garden window, letting her secret thoughts blow through her mind like the disoriented branches of the stable oak trees that preceded her. She was safe; she was stable; she was home.