writerjenna
My mother always gave to charity. Like clockwork, she donated to the Red Cross, to UNICEF...to any suicide prevention center she could find. My brother's allowance went straight to those centers, now that he wasn't alive to receive it.
Sometimes I gave them my allowance, too.
"Oh, I would be delighted to help!" Clarice said. Rita wondered if she knew how insincere she really sounded.
"Great," Rita said. "Here, take this. Sweep all the clippings into the trash."
"Sure thing!"
Rita scowled. Spending the summer working in her mother's salon was proving insufferable.
On the day his child was to be born, Aldrich was more frazzled than Bernadette had ever seen him. He had spent all day laboring under a sweltering sun, but that didn't stop him from smiling and scurrying around the house in nervous yet excited anticipation.
Cyra rarely wore earrings or other jewelry, but that day she all but glittered in borrowed finery. It was a rare day; a day where they could forget the troubles in the city and make merry. Friends, family, everyone had come to celebrate.
The violets filled my mother's garden with their soft fragrance, and pairing with the sticky-sweet reek of rotting rose petals it was overwhelming. She hadn't been out to tend her beloved plants in who knew how long, and it showed. Just about everything was half-wilted, it seemed, and a thick blanket of dead leaves and decaying petals coated the withered grass.
Her skin was nearly translucent. I could see pale blue veins beneath it, pulsing slightly as her blood flowed through them. She seemed ethereal; wispy, as if she might be blown away at any second. Her hair was brittle and white--not grey, but the stark white of the elderly, with just a hint of a yellow that reminded me of pus.