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Wednesday’s Word and Flash Fiction: The Rat

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on Today’s Word (from Wordsmith.org). Check Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar for past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces.

Today’s word:

cashier. verb tr.: To dismiss from service, especially with disgrace. noun: An employee who handles payments and receipts in a store, bank, or business.

This week’s theme on Wordsmith.org is about words that have multiple and unrelated meanings. When I read the word of the day this morning – which is simple enough, I decided to write a story that incorporated both meanings.

*****

The Rat

Derek had been scamming McGregor’s Hardware Store since the first day he started working there three weeks ago.

Karen noticed it right away. His first day was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays were always slow. Karen took customers at checkout number 7, while Derek worked number 6. Karen was supposed to show Derek the ropes, Mr. McGregor said, but Derek seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

He had a way with words — a smooth talker Karen’s mother might say. He chatted up his customers as he rang up their orders. He rattled off the total while probing them with questions about whatever home project their purchase revealed. When an older gentleman said he was building a dollhouse for his granddaughter, Karen looked over Derek’s shoulder.

What a sweet old man, she thought.

Then, she saw on Derek’s computer screen that he read the customer’s total wrong, he upped it ten dollars exactly. He took the man’s money, put it all in his drawer, then gave the man his change and receipt. After the old man left, Karen spoke up.

“You took ten dollars too much,” Karen said. “You read the total wrong. Your drawer will be over, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Derek smiled and said he was going on break.

She watched him through his whole shift. He didn’t charge every customer extra, just a few here and there. And, sure enough, when she and Derek counted out their drawers in the back room after their shift, he “discovered” that he was over.

“Hmmm. Look at that,” he said. Then, he counted out the extra amount and put it in his pocket.

“What are you doing?” Karen shrieked. “You can’t take that!”

“I can’t let my drawer be over $50. My paycheck will get docked.” He signed his tally sheet and picked up his drawer to leave.

“That’s only if you’re drawer is short,” said Karen.

“Well, best to keep it balanced, anyway. I don’t want to upset McGregor,” he said. “See ya.” Then, Derek left, just like that. And, $50 richer.

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Bingo

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on Today’s Word (from Wordsmith.org). Check Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar for past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces.

Today’s word:

Hobson’s choice. noun. an apparently free choice that offers no real alternative.

I began the first draft of this post with “Write whatever…,” since I woke up void of inspiration and lacking in time. Still, I wrote, which is the whole point of this exercise: write, even when you don’t feel like it. What resulted is more than flash fiction; we’re talking short story here. That’s what happens, I guess, when you chew on a story all day — it grows.

*****

Bingo

After oversleeping, I had fifteen minutes and sixty dollars to get to the bus station.

I begged my college roommate, Andi for a ride. “Come on,” I said as I shook her for the third time. “If you don’t drive me the two miles to the station, you’ll be stuck hauling my butt all the way to Minneapolis.” I tossed her car keys onto the bed. “And don’t ignore me. You’re the one who got me into this mess in the first place.”

Two weeks earlier, I made the mistake of whining – for the thousandth time, she said – about no work for the summer and the horrible prospect of begging my parents for another loan. So, Andi signed me up for catering gigs with the company where she works.

“You earn a chunk of change for each job,” she said. “The only problem is, newbies get stuck manning the Bingo Marathon in Minneapolis.”

“A marathon playing bingo? It can’t be that bad.” I said.

“You’d be surprised.” She had loaned me one of her catering shirts and told me not to spill anything on it.

Knowing I couldn’t miss this bus, I stood at the foot of her bed and threatened her again.

“Get up, or I’ll have a run-in with some chocolate cake. And, you know I can’t afford to buy you another shirt.”

At the bus station, I bought a round trip ticket from Duluth to Minneapolis – fifty dollars even with my student discount. The Ticket Master said he wouldn’t override the automated seat assignment, and I didn’t have time to plead. So, with ten dollars left to my name, I traveled three hours in the last row of the bus, on the side with one seat.

I avoided random conversations with strangers, but I panicked when a waft of diesel fumes sent me hacking and hallucinating. I saw flashes of light and old women shooting craps down the aisle of the bus while smoking cigars. Asking my parents for a loan would have been easier and less traumatic, I thought.

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Beulah Land

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on Today’s Word (from Wordsmith.org). Check Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar for past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces.

Today’s word:

shangri-la. noun. an imaginary, idyllic place that is remote and secluded.

After reading the definition, I had an idea of the kind of story I wanted to write. The quote that follows the word on Wordsmith.org solidified my idea:

“For just one hour you think you are living in dreamland, a Shangri-La, where if life is not yet quite perfect, it will be very soon.”
~Simon Hoggart; Budget 2010; The Guardian (London, UK); Mar 25, 2010.

What follows is a story about a space in time rather than a physical place, a story that grew from a memory. Memories, for me, sometimes appear as old snapshots — thick and colored with shades of brown and yellow – where details can get lost. So, I can’t call the story memoir, but I can’t call it fiction either. I’ll call it biomythography, a term coined by Audre Lorde in her book, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name.

*****

Beulah Land

As a little girl, summers in Texas were marked by heat, not the calendar.

Heat, and the color of the mulberries on the tree that sat deep in the heart of Fort Worth, in the front yard of my grandmother’s small, old house.

“That’s not a tree for climbin’,” she would remind me. “But, go on and pick some berries. The big purple ones. Not the pink.”

In my sundress and bare feet, I stepped out onto her front porch. The cement was warm from the sun, so I stood there until my feet burned.

Then, too short to reach the tree branches, I dragged an old metal chair, by the arms, down the porch steps. I walked backwards and inched the chair across the scratchy grass. Then, I pushed it up against the tree trunk.

I surveyed the branches, which fanned out like an umbrella, and the berries that grew in clusters — plenty of big, purple, plump berries.

Because the ground was uneven, the chair wobbled when I stood on it. But, I held myself steady by grabbing onto the trunk. I walked my hands up the tree and across the first branch. Stretching up on my toes, I pulled off one mulberry.

It was ripe and juicy and took up most of the space in my palm. I wrapped my hand around the mulberry and leaned down to drop it gently into the bowl sitting at my feet.

When the bowl was full, I took it inside to my grandmother. There, in her apron, she stood at the kitchen sink. She washed the mulberries and dried them on a cloth. Then, she set them in the bowl again.

She scattered one, two, three big spoonfuls of sugar over the top, and handed me the bowl.

“Take these on outside, now,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

The screen door slammed closed and a cool breeze caught the hem of my dress. My feet slapped the cement as I ran down the steps of the porch. I wiggled onto the chair, still at its station under the tree.

Shaded by the mulberry branches, I sat in the heat of a Texas summer and ate mulberries with a spoon. I swung my legs and thought of nothing but the feel of the smooth metal chair on my thighs, the juice of the sweet berries, and the purple stains on my fingers.

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