Two Women

 

The café where Rick and I free write was closed for holiday. We drove thru the sunflowers, cornfields and vineyards to the next village and found another café.

The prompt was a woman, late thirties with a long slightly graying braid and an older woman with white hair, obviously at least 20 years older.

Rick's free write Braided Pony Tail

The younger woman was nervous, fidgety, picking at something invisible on her arm, rubbing something on her thigh as she half-listened to the white-haired woman sitting close beside her on the grass terrace of the small village café.

Their posture was defensive, her jeans and army green t-shirt, sans bra, a contrast to the older woman's tailored jacket and designer sunglasses. 

A farm girl perhaps.But she had the left the farm or was about to do so, and her friend was counseling her to carve out a new life without Carl, without grapevines without pigs out the kitchen window.

She was still relatively young, relatively healthy, strong. But she had no marketable skills, so where might she work? A grocery?  A shop downtown? She'd need new clothes to do that and she had no money of her own.

Maybe she would just go back to the farm.After all, the only thing Carl knew was she'd  gone to have coffee with an old friend.

D-L's free write I have to tell you...

 "Have you told her yet?"

"No," she texted and shut down her phone.

Her mother appeared with a tray of croissants and two espressos.

When she was home, she and her mom met here Monday mornings "to start the week," her mom said.

The last time she and Phil had been away for a year. They were nomads, he's told her. They'd spent a year in London and 10 months on a cargo ship going from port to port with home stays in between. "Prison time," Phil called it.

The cafe's garden was a bit unkempt with unmatching tables and chairs. All kinds of flowers, whose names she didn't know, surrounded the terrace. She called them yellow, pink, purple.

She knew her mother wouldn't say anything against her and Phil's next adventure. "There's something I need to tell you," she said.

Her mother leaned forward. She still had her figure and an unwrinkled face. "Me too."

"You first." 

Her mother looked at her hands. "I've the biopsy results. They weren't good."

We use free writes to prime our writing pumps, never mind the pleasure of a good café sit. We write non-stop for ten minutes triggered by the prompt. We make no corrections. The pieces could be polished into a flash fiction piece or even a chapter in a novel. Or we could go back to our writing projects underway.