This story takes place in the world of Mercy, my 2025 serialized novel.
Kayla remembered the May when she was 14 as the date when she became older than her mother. She didn’t know why--nothing remarkable happened. The hard things had happened before that, years before. All of her grandparents had died, but when Grandpa Lew died, when she was eight, her heart wouldn’t stop grabbing at her chest. Somebody might have said that he wasn’t always nice to her, somebody else might have seen how he gruffly talked over her little chatter, how he moved her aside roughly when she inconvenienced him. But what she saw were the golden times, when he would hold her on his lap, rough whiskers on her smooth face, and they’d watch The Shining together, or some other old movie, eating ice cream on salty crackers, falling asleep until her mom would pick her up after work at 1 am.
This story is now available as a Kindle book and as a terribly amateurish (but free) podcast post!
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