Today we see calls for flash fiction or flash memoir - This could be either, I suppose. It is less than 400 words. Virginia Walsh is a writer but doesn't submit her work for publishing. She wrote this story in a class at Writers Circle around the Table. I asked if I could post it here for my readers. I think you will enjoy it.
The First Paycheck
By Virginia Walsh
Kate stared at the envelope, turning it over and over in her
hands and reading the red imprinted words in the upper left corner, Ripley’s
Drugstore, 2341 Fourteenth Street, Detroit, Michigan. In the right lower corner
was written the amount enclosed in the small, two by three inch envelope used
for dispensing pills for the customers. Wow! So much money, she thought. She
could not have known then she would be eighty-one before she could let the
envelope go.
A few months into World War Two, with working papers in hand, she applied at the corner drugstore for a job.
“Come in next Monday,” Mr. Ripley said. She was
ecstatic—helping the war effort and earning money as well.
Kate felt so grown up, earning a paycheck that would be her
own. It offered independence as well as self-responsibility. However, before
Monday, Kate had come down with measles. Kids had measles, for goodness sake,
not a young adult lady. A low blow to her inflated ego, indeed.
Her dad talked to Mr. Ripley who said, “Tell her to come
in when she’s well.”
While still holding the envelope, thoughts as fast as a
March wind blew through her mind. What to buy first. A new pair of shoes, a
coffee table for her mother, that new yellow sweater she saw in a downtown
store?
I should send my brother five
dollars, she thought. He was stationed in San Diego waiting to ship out,
and someone had stolen his wallet. Hastily tucking the envelope into the pocket
of her white uniform, she slipped off the stool to wait on a customer.
In the end, she put down a deposit on layaway to hold a
coffee table. She bought the sweater and sent her brother five dollars. Money
well spent by her definition.
Seventy-seven years later the last thing she glimpsed as she
let the browned fragile two by three envelope slip from her hand into the abyss
of yesteryear was Mr. Ripley’s handwritten number, $10.25.
