This week’s prompt is to write a piece including these three words:
content, yard, allowance
Write for at least 7 minutes. You’re welcome to share your piece in the comments if you’d like to.
This week’s prompt is to write a piece including these three words:
content, yard, allowance
Write for at least 7 minutes. You’re welcome to share your piece in the comments if you’d like to.
The Going Rate
Every Sunday since the funeral there was a five-dollar bill under the flat stone by the fence, and Dale learned early not to ask who left it.
She was eleven the first time. She'd gone out at dawn because she couldn't sleep in a house that had gotten so much quieter, and there it was, folded into a tight green square the way her father folded everything, down to the corners of her birthday paper. She told herself it was the wind. The next Sunday she told herself it was a neighbor. By the fourth she stopped telling herself anything and spent it: gum, a paperback, once a plastic ring that turned her finger the color of a bruise.
Her father never mentioned it. He sat at the kitchen window with his coffee going cold and watched her cross the yard and crouch by the stone, and his face stayed so empty that she came to understand the emptiness itself was the instruction. Don't. So she didn't.
The amount climbed the year she turned fourteen. Ten dollars, then twenty, as if someone were keeping pace with her, with the things an older girl wants and might go looking for if she didn't have them. She started to think of it as an allowance, though nothing had been allowed out loud. It was simply a fact of the yard, like the lilac coming back, like the fence leaning a little further into the neighbor's every winter.
She was seventeen when she lifted the stone on a Saturday, a day early, when there was nothing under it yet to take.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Some machinery of grief, some answer folded into the ground. There was only the bare scrape of dirt where tomorrow's bill would lie. She had never once dug. She dug now. A hand's depth down, her fingers found the lid of a coffee tin. Inside, a stack of bills gone soft as cloth, and beneath them, where the rust had eaten through, one photograph. Her mother in a yard that wasn't this yard, younger than Dale was now, laughing at something past the edge of the frame, one hand lifted as if to say that's enough, you've had your fun.
On the back, in her father's small, square handwriting: In case I forget what content looks like.
She put it all back. Tamped the dirt, set the stone square to the fence, exactly as it had been. Then she went in and made two cups of coffee and carried one to the window, and her father took it without looking at her, and they watched the empty grass go gold as the light came up over the lilac, and neither of them said one word.
She's grown now. Her father is the one who's gone, and the house is hers, and at dawn it's quiet again.
But every Sunday she folds a five-dollar bill into a tight green square and sets it under the stone, square to the fence. For no one.
She doesn't watch to see who comes for it.
So far, every Monday, it has been gone.
The doors rolled, “Clank, Clank, Clank”,
Dried eggs, old tortillas and some green shit
The doors rolled, Clank, Clank, Clank, every morning at 4:36. Followed by the annoying voice of the duty officer over a crackling PA. “This morning announcement, everyone out, file out to the rec’ yard. Inspection day, move it girls”.
“Damn inspection day, seems like they're doing this once a week now.” sputtered my “celly” as he fell from his top bunk perch.
“Come on Manuel, it'll give us a chance to get out of this hellhole for a while. Get out and see some sunshine “. Besides, all they want to do is just go through all of our stuff and see what kind of content we're stashing.
“No sunshine today Manuel”. Cloudy and rainy, our white dungarees be soakin’ wet after a while. I think they do it just because we can't get dry clothes until after showers tonight.
At least it won't be so hot on the floor. “But damn, Manuel, you gone a be stinking by then”.
By the time they let us back in it was time for chow. Our meager allotment of dried eggs, a tortilla and some green shit. Not sure what it was but it didn't look very tasty. Once we got back to the cell Manuel was starting to wreak pretty bad. Nobody said life in the county jail was supposed to be pretty.