i swear i actually write sometimes

I promise, I actually do. Things have been extra crazy lately with Nick's job training. But I am working on stuff. Here's a rough draft of something that I'm stuck stuck on. It started out as one of the flash fictions inspired by Bonnie's ten list, but I'm over 400 words already and don't know when it's going to end. It might still be flash fiction, but I don't know yet.

Anyway:

For a year, after my uncle had lost his job, he lived in a tent in our backyard. Every morning over bowls of soggy cereal, he would tell us about all the animals he heard and saw.  He would hear mosquitoes, owls, and coyotes during the night until the sprinklers sloshed him awake. He never had kids of his own, so his yarns lacked the whimsy and ridiculous details that we craved from stories. His voice would drone on to remark on every detail of two cats fighting and then seemingly finding a way to settle their differences as it lasted for no longer than three minutes. Then there was a time that he snuck into the house to go to the bathroom and as he was zipping himself back into his tent, he saw the silhouette of a possum on the backyard fence before it scurried back into the night. 

That summer, Jenny and I decided that we wanted to become either archeologists or bathtubs when we grew up, and we spent most of our time in the backyard while Uncle Andy pulled weeds as a favor to our mother. Armed with plastic shovels and paintbrushes stolen from our dried and stained watercolor paints, Jenny and I searched for dinosaur bones and ancient burial grounds. Jenny would wrench a stone from the dirt before gently attempting to brush the dust off it.

“What do you think it is?” she asked me breathlessly.

            I narrowed my eyes in the bright sunlight. “That is a dinosaur egg.”

            Jenny cupped it carefully in her hands. “We have to keep it warm so it can hatch,” she said urgently. She was about to walk back into the house when she noticed something in the hole where the egg used to be.  

            There were bones. They looked like pieces of burned popcorn, but hard and flat in weird places.

            “Probably just chicken bones.” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe a caveman cooked food here a long time ago.”

            Jenny plucked a few of the bones from the hole and carried them to Uncle Andy. She dropped them into to the flowerbed he was squatted near.

            “What’s this?” He asked. He picked one up and examined it carefully. “Looks like part of a spine.” He looked at it for a little bit longer and then he suddenly let go of it. He turned on his knees to look at us, wiping his hands quickly on his thighs. “That is a human bone,” he declared. 

much love,
hedgie