Hoop for Episode 77 - The Kind Mother, for @marks.b_ who kindly donated to the Palestine Children Relief Fund. Thank you!!
“I excused myself, and moved quickly out towards the back garden. Neither of them made a move to stop me. I saw a phone near the back porch and grabbed it, intending to call the police, when something caught my eye. It was a series of photographs on the wall, showing our family in happier times. It had been there for as long as I’d been to the house, and likely a lot longer. I had spent a long time staring at it my first visit there, lost in pleasant nostalgia, remembering days at the beach or the trip we took to Hanover when I was eight.
But now, in every one of them there stood this new woman where my mother should have been. She looked younger in these pictures, just like my father, and across the dozen pictures on the wall I could see a timeline of this woman growing old alongside him. There was no way these photos could have been staged, and I could even see a small crease on the bottom corner of the Hanover picture. I remembered I’d sat on the pictures by accident on the journey home, bending the corner out of place. I’d got a nasty talking to after that, and certainly not from the kindly fraud currently putting the kettle on in the kitchen.”
