I’m searching for a title…ideas?
Today, of all days, she wanted to believe in something. This day marked her at a quarter of a century old; she felt older. Marlee didn’t regret coming back home after college. She loved the long and empty pastures and fields. The seasons were plain to see: white snow in winter, the bright green of spring, the ripening yellow wheat of summer, and the deep brown of fall. Her own season was browning like fall, going dormant and empty and draining her a little at a time.
Her father hadn’t asked her to come home, but it’d been there in his voice when he’d told her that he was too weak to travel for her graduation. He’d said he be getting stronger soon. And she didn’t come straight away. Comfortable in the college town where she’d spent four years, she found a job teaching and hoped to make something of her writing.
But it soon became clear that she had to come home. There was no one else. Her whole life it had been Marlee and her dad. She didn’t even really know what had happened to her mom and she rarely thought to ask her dad about it, not since she was a little girl. Oh, he’d comment now and then that her dark brown hair was the same color as her mother’s, or that he didn’t know where Marlee’s blue eyes had come from because his were brown and so were her mother’s. She had his crooked nose and long fingers but was just average height like her mother.
Her father had never remarried. He’d never even dated anyone. But around here, there wasn’t really anyone to date. She and her dad were a team. That’s what he told her and that’s what she believed. So, there was something she believed.
She stood there, leaning on the counter. The soggy head gear hanging from her right hand while her gloved left hand held tight to the dead cell phone. Pulling in a shaky breath, Marlee stared out the kitchen window seeing nothing but cold grey fog.
That may be the right one, if, she can get past her empty bitterness.
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Because, Love…
I heard it so clearly as I read it… why did she do this? Why did she come home? Because, Love…
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