I have a friend who have to most perfect grammar, and comes from a long standing family of writtings, but when ever I read anything fictional or allegorical, I can't help but wince because it feels horrifyingly clinical to me. I'll never have the nerve to tell him what I really think, so I do my best to dance around it. Mostly I say things like, "I liked your poignant view on the subject." And then babble about something I liked that he had and carefully avoid any questions by briskly changing the topping. Thankfully, he's still young and nubile so porn always does the trick.

Drabble: trick and/or treat

Generation gap

My great grandfather was a horse trader in Arkansas whose biggest triumph was that time he sold a blind horse to a Yankee and then, after the Yankee discovered his error, got him to pay my great grandfather to take the horse back again.

My grandmother didn't understand my dismay when she told me the story. I told her I couldn't be proud that her father-in-law had been a cheat, even a clever one. She patiently explained that 1) caveat emptor was the first rule of horse trading, and 2) the victim was a Yankee, which made it a real treat.

My drabble is about both a treat and a trick...question at least

I might be nine, and hanging out with my sixteen year old uncle is one of my favorite things. He is right up there with my favorite people on the planet, my dad’s baby brother, even though Mama says he’s “unbalanced” when she talks to her friends on the phone. He walks just fine that I can see, but it’s not like I really know.
We go into his bedroom(and I’m a student in college before I notice that people usually mean something very dramatic when they write an opposite-sex scene like that) but we’re just hanging out. It’s like not really being a girl for an hour or so. I like being a girl, but it’s kind of cool guessing what being a boy is like.

Steve puts M&M’s in his hands, one in each. “Which one is prettier?” he asks me and we go through the bag...green, yellow, orange,tan, brown.Mom says there used to be red ones, but they gave people cancer so now they can’t have red ones.I’m already starting to notice that life isn’t as nice as people want me to think it is and I wish they still had red ones. We’re at the end of the bag now and the candy in both hands has a brown shell on it. I’ve given answers that Steve’s liked so far, in terms of what’s prettier, but now, this is hard, even if it hasn’t hit me that he’s given me a question there’s no answer for...it’s like that show, with Grasshopper and the pebble.

I pick the one that the light’s shining on hardest...I think it makes a little difference.

I wait for him to notice, but another thing I can already tell is I’m different from most of my family. I hear words off the TV and use them and they laugh, and only my mom reads as many books as me...somehow I’ve done something nerdish again.

“Why’d you pick that one, doofus?” he says, but his laughter is affectionate. “They’re the exact same. I thought you’d say they were the same.”

Jesus, erika. I read that last line, opened my mouth, closed it again, because really, all right there, nothing to say.

Damn.

I debated about adding something about how I never told him why, or how we did that a few more times and I never tried to choose between two brown ones(I got the "pretty" ones, he ate the rejects.) but then I thought that was story enough. I ate a lot of M's as a child, if I can still tell you what the '80s bag looked like!

Wow, Erika. That's amazing.

Thank you.

(I got the "pretty" ones, he ate the rejects)

And your eyes were way better than his were.

Yeah, I think so. Now he's a divorced prison guard living with his mama and no fun anymore.

my take on the drabble

It was the late 60s. I knew nothing of life beyond the hills I was born in. Walter Cronkite stood next to a chalkboard and used unfamiliar words like Viet Cong and casualties.

The church gave us Trick or Treat for Unicef boxes, telling us it would help kids like us in other parts of the world. We went out, glad to help.

The people opening their doors lost their smiles, gave us candy but no coins. A woman pulled us in, sat us down in her living room, and told us that Unicef was a front for bad people and that the money would go to someone called Communists. Then she smiled, gave us candy, and sent us on our way.

I miss the hills. I don't miss the people.