Only the second week of the Five Minute Fiction challenge and we had ten entries and nearly eighty nine voters! And holy cow was that down to the wire!
The competition was intense. But the fat lady just did a horrible rendition of “We Are the Champions” and the winner is:
Reposted below is her entry.
Be sure to congratulate she who trumped us, and tweet/blog her to fame and fortune. And come back and stomp her next week.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
Becca’s entry:
Bethany tried it on. Secured it with several bobby pins over her hair. A mesh to capture the unruly snakelike strands of hair created by lack sleep and nightmares.
She took the hair net off and set it on the vanity beside the vixen-red lip stick, the glass jewelry box, and the abandoned wedding ring.
Snapshots of Bethany and her mother stacked along the edge of the mirror. Her mother’s eyes stared back at her. The same gray eyes, hope lost, dulled.
Tears glossed her eyes and spilled over the cusp her lower lid. They trailed down the front of her face, trickling a path to her lips where the salty taste served only as a memory of her mother’s death.
She’d served this country and died at sea. But the little back heels beside the vanity chair and the the small tin holding Bethany’s first lost tooth revealed her mother was so much more than a sailor’s lunch lady.
Bethany tucked the lipstick and hair net into her pocket, gave a small smile to a photo of her mother, and headed downtown to enlist.
impressive stuff, Becca