Stories To Read To Your Adult Children

By Spencer Franklin

Real stories about made-up people, or fictional things done by real people. Or both.

These stories were written by an adult, and therefore they may have adult themes and the occasional F-bomb. They were written in a facility that may also have been used to process peanuts.

The world is a complicated place, but if you break it down into 1,500 word chunks, it's usually manageable. : )

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spencer Franklin
• Release date: May 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781301441297

Spencer Franklin

Spencer lives in Austin, Texas with a dog, a cat, and a growing suspicion that we do not, in fact, live in the best of all possible worlds.

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STORIES TO READ TO YOUR ADULT CHILDREN

by

Spencer Franklin

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Spencer Franklin on Smashwords

Stories To Read To Your Adult Children

Copyright © 2010 by Spencer Franklin

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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MYRNA

I hadn't seen her since eighth grade graduation, but it would have been impossible for me not to recognize her. I was on Microsoft's site getting stock photos of office workers, then using GIMP to put them into photos of historical disasters...it was Thursday, that's what I do on Thursdays. Fucking Thursdays.

Anyway, it wasn't that she looked the same, because her face clearly showed every second of the twenty-plus years that had passed. It was her expression; I suppose she was aiming for caught while glancing up from my laptop as I ponder some really important business decision or something like that, but what I saw was purposefully looking as though I don't know that you're looking at me, simply because that was the expression she had been wearing for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half STRAIGHT every time I looked at her in junior high.

I was never sure whether she managed to maintain that look 24/7, or if she had some kind of freakish radar that allowed her to assume it just before my eyes moved her direction, hiding whatever she had been thinking behind the perpetual cool of put-on indifference.

I guess it doesn't really matter in the long run; we each create our own reality, and we’re the ones that have to live in it, no matter the cost. If you're too scared to let someone know you're vulnerable to them, you're safe...but being safe and being happy aren’t nearly the same thing.

I put her in the Whitman tower shooting; I guess the lighting matched the best on some of those photos, and I wasn't really up for a challenging night after the shock of having run across her again after all of those years. Her facial expression didn't really fit in, I guess, but it didn't matter very much in the finished product. I didn't have her taking a bullet or anything, after all, and there may have been people at that scene so lost in themselves that they still managed to maintain an assumed expression in the face of the chaos and the panic, who can say.

I put it up on my blog, and it got more replies than most of the ones I’ve posted; some of the comments