Furious Fiction - December 2018

On the first Friday of every month, the AWC hosts Furious Fiction. Participants are given a set of criteria to follow with a strict word limit of 500 words or less. Below is my entry for December.

Dear Diary,

Elizabeth is sleeping beside me and I’ve finally managed to calm her down after telling her Santa won’t make it this year with the present she really wanted. I tried my best, I really did. I used all the coins I had left over from delivering newspapers across town to purchase Chatty Cathy but by the time I moved my little bottom all the way to the convenience store it was gone in a flash, with some other mother’s purchasing it on the counter and running about their day. Smiling. Laughing. I wonder how many of them were simply lying to the world. Michael’s Convenience Store had the television documenting the Vietnam War and the three American astronauts that headed towards the moon in Apollo 8. How good would it have been to just disappear away to space? Far away from my abusive husband who didn’t let me have any time to myself. Thankfully he is asleep too right now giving me time to even write this journal entry. If he ever found it I’d be dead.

I managed to go for a walk today to see all the town’s ladies putting up their Christmas trees, struggling to get it up the stairs while their husbands sat and drank some tea and smoked a cigar on the front porch, leaving all the work to their women who guaranteed spent the afternoon using their last pennies to purchase the greatest gifts from Santa. Elizabeth understood that sometimes Santa didn’t have enough money himself to purchase pricey gifts for everyone, I did manage to score her a Suzy Homemaker set but I knew she really wanted the Barbie. Hopefully she understands. I can only hope that in another fifty years’ time she has enough money to spoil her children in the way that I always wish I did. I hope her husband spends Christmas with her rather than away from her and helps her cook up a storm come Christmas day. I hope that by the time she’s fifty-seven she gets to enjoy Christmas herself, rather than dread the visualisation that she would have to be cleaning up everybody’s scraps and mopping the floors or else she’ll get beaten. I’m watching her right now, snoring away in her sleep excited for the clock to strike twelve so she can wake up and see what we’ve put for her under the tree. I just hope she’s happy. I know I’m not. It sure doesn’t feel like the most wonderful time of the year.