The Over Achiever

Every now and then I play around with the short-short story. It amuses me to see how much 'story' one can tell with so few words. Here is today's effort.(100 words)

The Over Achiever

©  Hazel Campbell 2015

 

Nobody likes my mother. She is an overachiever and batters everybody with this. "I" is the centre of all her universes. Anything you can do she has done better. Hell! I don’t like her.

   I am a good cook. She has fed presidents.

   I applied for training to go to the moon. She is the moon.

   I killed my husband. She murdered three of hers.

   They allowed me to witness her getting the fatal  needle for her crimes. She was the first woman in my country to be thus executed. 

   I wonder what she will overachieve wherever it is she has gone.

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Good old Anancy story days and nights

Thinking about the far away days when there was no television, and home entertainment was only radio or storytelling for the children in the yard at nights, if you were lucky to have parents or any adults who had not yet divorced themselves from their rural connections and had a fount of these stories to share.

     The stories were very scary and to hear the adults tell it, even more so in the rural setting where the only light was from the moon as they gathered in front of someone's house to hear about the hauntings of duppies or the antics of Anancy. Many are the stories about not being able to walk home in the country darkness, especially if alone.

But, what I have come to realize is that the greater part of the experience was the sense of community; the coming together, the feeling of camaraderie as people laughed together or commented on aspects of the story or added their own witty comments. It was also a learning experience for the children as the adults commented on the wisdom or error of the ways of the characters in the stories.

Domestic entertainment today is fast becoming an individual event, between the I -phones and I -pads and I -tablets and I - laptops . . . you name it, everything is now I. Even the gathering of the family  in the living room to watch television together is fast becoming a thing of the past as each person does his/her  own thing on some electronic devise. Such a loss.

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