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July is Flash Fiction Month! I’ll be sharing short short stories here through the month of July. 

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It started with a composition notebook, black and white splotches on the cover. Gradually, the lined pages filled up with words. Every time the writer closed its cover, it was hidden away: under the bed, in the pillow case, between the mattress and the box spring. The writer knew those words were fragile.

No, not the words. She was fragile, and those words were pieces of her. Their secrets being seen by anyone would be exposing herself to the world.

Time passed. More composition books were filled up. Stories, songs, poems. They remained hidden.

When it was time to leave home, the writer (though she feared anyone discovering that she was a writer), took them with her. First to a dorm room, then an apartment, then a house. Then another house, where a plastic crate of composition books were put in the attic.

More time passsed. The writer died. Soon, her son and granddaughter were cleaning out the house. The granddaughter found the crate.

“Grandma wrote all these?” The granddaughter’s dark eyes went wide.

“Wow,” the son said. “She told me that she wrote her first novel when she was sixteen. She never let me read it. Said it was terrible.”

The granddaughter put her hand on one of the dusty covers. “Grandma started when she was my age.”

“Mm-hmm.” He considered the crate, his daughter, and his mother. “Do you want to keep them?”

“Yeah!” The granddaughter smiled with tears in her eyes. She found the oldest notebook, its spine broken. Her grandmother’s writing filled the pages, and the granddaughter’s mind.

The son let his daughter alone with the books. They were not for him.

They were for his daughter, holding on to a piece of her grandmother that only she got to see.