Bitter coffee. Bitter life.

She’d come back. She always did.

Image from Caroline Beuley

Bitter coffee. Bitter life.

She’d come back. She always did.

She was great at pretending she was perfectly fine, even though she’d always hated that phrase. It was an inherent opposition. Nothing was ever perfect and fine at the same time.

Still, she sat at her mother’s kitchen table, poised alongside its tacky plastic tablecloth. The aging remnant clung to the wood with decades-long purpose, proclaiming this was its space. And so it was. More than hers, at least. She was a cardboard box of forgotten homework assignments and dusty knick-knacks shoved into a closet. A distant memory of a perfectly fine childhood.

She resolved to leave, half-stood to do it.

Then that voice, a honeyed blade, beckoned her back. The way it always did.

“Adelaide, sweetheart, I need you,” her mother called, weak and thinned by sickness.

She sank back into the chair, resigned. She swigged her bitter coffee, bit back tears, and returned to her bitter life.

“Coming, mama.”

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My little micro-fiction from Caroline Beuley’s photo prompt.

Happy Friday!