Every week Denise, aka GirlieontheEdge, puts out a prompt to inspire writing. Though titled Six Sentence Stories, she kindly accepts poetry as well as prose, stanzas or lines as well as sentences. Easy-peasy. So why do I go months without participating? Dunno. But here is a six sentence story. It is another scene from a work in (non-)progress first sampled as a Six Sentence Story HERE. Link your six sentences and read others HERE.
Word To the Wise by D. Avery
When the rain stopped, or at least slowed to a drizzle, and the mud and gravel stopped coursing across the road and over and under and through Grandma’s Subaru in the driveway, and the river below her manufactured home was no longer rising, was in fact receding, she and I went and sat on one of the logs deposited by last summer’s flood and watched that mean muddy water of this one flow by.
As we sat there a spider emerged from the fissured bark and made its way towards Grandma. When she smacked it dead with her palm I said Don’t, if you kill a spider it’ll rain!, and she said that’s a cliché, and I said No, it isn’t, it’s an old wives’ tale, and she snorted and flicked the spider off the log into the dripping wet weeds.
The river was still running very strong, in fact as we sat there a mattress came whirling and wheeling downstream.
As the mattress plunged and spun along in the roiling water, Grandma said “You make your bed, you lie in it.”
I don’t know if that’s a cliché or another old saying, or both, but it got me thinking that maybe all of us have thoughtlessly killed too many spiders and brought all this rain and flooding down on ourselves— a karmic accumulation of cause and effect.
I kept my thinking to myself, even though I figured Grandma would know I was speaking metaphorically.
ShiftnShake 