“You’re in charge of your brother,” my mother would say. “If anything happens, it’s your responsibility.” She’d plant the youngest in the seat of the grocery cart and off she went, leaving me and my middle kid brother parked at the magazine rack.
I was ten.
What could happen?
No one really thought anything could.
Eventually though, things did happen to kids left alone and to quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.
Leaving an oldest child to make quick decisions in place of a parent was considered a training of sorts in my family, an expectation passed forward by my mother from her mother, a lovely gentle woman raised during the Depression in rural Virginia. Later in life, my grandmother would be diagnosed with osteoporosis. X-rays of the bones in her arms reflected stress markers associated with carrying far too much weight at a far too young age. Likely from carrying heavy buckets of water filled from the North Fork Holston River up the hill to her house, she told me.
The weight placed on my too tiny shoulders would shape as those of a future advocate in a career rampant with in locus parentis …
… and as a mother with children as close as she could keep them.
***
Think on the bright side, a constant phrase tossed around as a familial explanation. I got the grocery shopping done quickly. You are lucky to be able to read, so sit with your brother and enjoy yourself.
Help your mother, she has her hands full, my grandmother said when she called long distance.
She did have her hands full, way too young. Soon to be over responsible me was born to a nineteen year old young woman with dreams of closing the door on any place associated with drawing water from a river.
And she did.
***
My story “Magazine Rack” is an over-the-top telling of a daughter who knows her mother means business. The use of humor in the build of chaos works to address “the what could happen, will happen” theme when kids are left to their own devices.
Read the story here.
“Magazine Rack" was published by KYSO Flash, (Issue 11, Spring 2019) [Online] and included in the print journal Earth Hymn, KYSO Flash Anthology 2019, (1/2019).
Editor Clare MacQueen listed the story as a fave here: KYSO Flash 100 Faves: "Magazine Rack"@ MacQueen's Quinterly: Resources, 2019. She is presently the Editor in Chief of MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature.
Many thanks, Clare.
I absolutely love reading all of your stories !
Thanks for reading!