THE EXISTENTIAL SEVEN-YEAR-OLD

Latest posting for the Health Activist Writing Month Challenge WEGO http://blog.wegohealth.com

Prompt #29: Six Sentence Story. In this day of micro-blogging – brevity is a skill worth honing. Can you tell a story and make it short and sweet? What can you say in six sentences. Check out some here: http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/ 

Shirley was seven, sitting next to her teenage sister, Angie, in the crowded waiting room at Gate #8 with an hour to wait before boarding, and the woman on the other side of her sister was talking about an article she had read, something about a guy whose wife had disappeared three years ago who picked up his two little kids at the grandmother’s house, took them home, shut the front door, and blew up the house with the three of them in it.

With her brow furrowed like a washboard, Angie moaned, “If it’s true that we choose our lives before we even enter the womb, how could the grandparents choose to experience THAT? I mean the grandparents, to choose to lose first their daughter? and then their grandchildren?"

Shirley exhaled loudly, thinking how pointless it was to even think about making up stories about other peoples’ lives who weren’t even family and then get all worked up over the made up stories. “If I were making up a story”, thought Shirley, “I would make up that the kids and father were really unhappy and just wanted freedom, and the grandparents wanted to learn who they would be if they didn’t have family, if it was just them together, the way it was when they first fell in love. Anyway, my life’s complicated enough right here and now”, she thought, and then she scooted a little further away from her sister and turned up the volume on her iPod.