Wednesday Excerpts #2

Today on Deadlines for Writers I had two story pieces and one poem due.

All About The Gold (1000-word scene fragment from Book 2 in the Lighthouse Island Series; prompt: “you’ve been told”)

EXCERPT:                Cilla stared down at her finger twisting a thread on her ripped jeans.  Red tried to gather compassion, telling herself Cilla’s main problems were her youth and her family – neither of which she could control.  But Red didn’t know where inside her own life experience to find empathy for someone born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, who had never had to work a day in her life, yet still tried to steal from someone else.

               Well, they did have one thing in common.  Preston.  Cilla’s older brother, Red’s erstwhile younger . . . what?  Lover?  Pill supplier?  Manipulator?  Betrayer.  A decade and a half earlier, when Cilla was still a little girl, Red had met Preston at a low point in her life.  He’d lured her into a life of drugs and crime.  When the FBI closed in, Preston skipped out.  Red served time.  Preston sailed the Caribbean, pulling cons until the local hoodlums on Belize burned his boat in retaliation for his interloping into their territory. 

               He’d shown up on Lighthouse Island after learning Red had returned there.   Cilla, only 17 at the time and bored in Miami, followed him.  When she found a suitcase full of fentanyl in his room, she’d turned him in.  He was finally put away.  So, Cilla had done at 17 what Red had been too weak to do in her late 30s.  Maybe, if she couldn’t find empathy, Red could muster up some respect.

               “What is it, Cilla?”

               “I went to see Preston.”

               “In jail?”

               “Yeah, where else?”

               “Just checking.  And?”

               Cilla tugged at the thread she’d been twisting; her jeans puckered around the frayed designer hole.  Red, who’d had to scrimp and save for nice jeans when she was Cilla’s age, didn’t appreciate the whole ripped jeans fad.

               “Cilla, as fascinated as I am by watching you fiddle with that string, I wish you’d tell me what you came here to say.  You’ve been told I don’t give a shit about Preston Tucker, so why are you here?”

Millionaire Millie (150-word flash fiction prompt: “measure”; mini-scene from Book 2 in Lighthouse Island series)

EXCERPT: After the brief graveside service, Kelly exchanged well wishes with the pastor.  Red waited in the shade of a live oak.  Could you  miss someone you’d only known for a week?

            It turned out Aunt Millie had checked herself out of hospice when she’d learned of Red’s troubles.  Providing testimony about how she’d come to own the land on Sugarberry Lane had been her final act. 

Underneath the Widow’s Smile (Poem, prompt “underneath”)

EXCERPT:

Underneath the widow’s smile

As she graciously accepts the umpteenth pasta casserole

Lies the picture in her mind’s eye of a year’s worth of pasta casserole

In single-serve freezer bags.

The only thing she knows about her future

Is that she will never run out of single servings of pasta casserole.