Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly 100 word story.
Kitchen Table
When Marcus was six, his father threw their kitchen table across the dining room. It was feather light, barely more than cardboard. It broke when it landed, which made his father feel strong, no doubt.
In his own house, the table is so heavy it puts dents in the linoleum. His daughters do their homework there. It’s the last thing he looks at when he turns off the kitchen light.
Whenever they fight, he makes coffee for his wife and sets the mug on her side of the table.
She sits. Finds his hand across a mile of heavy oak.
The prompt for this one was “table,” a surprisingly versatile word. An honest character might lay all their cards on the table. A dishonest character might pay someone under one. For a shocking ending, having your protagonist turn the tables on someone is usually effective.
In the end, I stuck with the basic definition, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I had the idea for this story sometime around 6:00 in the morning, so I pulled my phone from the charger and angled the screen away from my sleeping wife while I wrote. (For the record, she doesn’t like all of my stories, but she did like this one.)
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