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My book for the 30 Day Image Prompt Contest |
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Hmm, let's see how this goes... ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only **
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| ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Holding hands in a snow drift of cotton, they smell Mama's perfume, lingering long after her body's been dumped into the ground and covered under hard pellets of winter dirt. Downstairs, Daddy holds a broken picture frame, jagged glass covering the wooden floorboards that creaked at night and gave them away as the dark-clothed men of the night sat with red taillights and lured them from their beds. His hands move over the smooth gloss of black and white, her veil fading into the floral wallpaper, sun-faded from years of hanging above the kitchen telephone with direct exposure from the window above the sink where she would look out on her daughters on summer days and promise to preserve their innocence for as long as possible. Even after they'd grown into ungrateful teenage cunts, she could still see them out there in their floral sundresses, sharing the tire swing under the shade of the sturdy oak, or dancing under a moonlit sky, arguing, always arguing, about the constellations, the hanger Leo from the more triangular Capricorn. And now, legs crossed, drowning in the sheets their mother had slowly faded away in, the girls looked into the yard and saw for the last time, their mother holding a tray of lemonade on a hot summer day. They knew the experience of the apron wrapped around her thin waist, heels avoiding every dip in the freshly mowed grass and hoped they had preserved her innocence. |