Tag Archives: 100 words

The Maudlin Sisters

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Maggie shivered in her dead mother’s nightgown, as the wind hurled branches at the roof, and dust tornadoes formed here and there on the attic floor. She stared into the locket, squinting at the Maudlin sisters- their smug faces and thin lips; the dumb noses which sat upon their faces like blind slugs.

The Maudlin girls… would have been 86 this year.
Had Maggie’s mother not murdered and buried them here.

Maggie closed the locket and went behind the house with a shovel. The Maudlin sisters shrieked from inside, crying for justice.

The ground below Maggie’s feet started to rumble.

 

-originally publ. on 100wordstory.org

The Seventh Son

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Seven sons was too many, and a girl could have helped smooth things. Ten years between the oldest and youngest. Ten years of hand-me-downs, rocks through windows, muddy sneakers and unsigned permission slips. After their father left, she kept the box around the house. With its crudely rendered front flap, it served as a reasonable disguise. She stapled straw hair to the top, and wrapped the middle with a torn blue dress.

When she dropped the box on their heads, her sons shrank down into feeble, trembling things. She longed for a daughter, who smelled sweet, like pineapples and cream.