Sunshowers

a short fiction story on bereavement

She stared at her daughter's blank English homework lying on the cold marble countertop wrinkled in one corner and stained mac-and-cheese yellow on the other. The words, Mommy, can you help me please, came from her daughter's toothless smile framed by feathery pigtails. 

Squinting to read the crumpled page through tired eyes, she raised it to her face. The title Sentence Structure filled the top half of the page in bold lettering. 

She had never been good at English, but never mind her inadequacies for a moment. She could handle third-grade grammar. 

Give an example of each of the following sentence types: 

She grabbed her daughter's sparkly violet mechanical pencil and they sat side by side affront a bay window that sheltered them from the continuous rain. Those comforting feathery pigtails rested on her upper arm as she read the rest of the worksheet. 

She read the first prompt and wrote the sentence that tormented her into madness for exactly three months and thirteen days like an airplane on a spiraling crash course toward Earth. 

1. Declarative Sentence:

I should have hugged him before he left.

2. Interrogative Sentence: 

How was I supposed to know that would be the last time I saw him?

3. Simple Sentence:

We fought all morning that day. 

It made him late for work. 

4. Complex Sentence:

After he slammed his truck door shut, the last I ever saw of him was his blue-turned-grey solemn eyes in his rearview mirror.

5. Compound Sentence: 

He always called me between 9:10 and 9:15 am when he arrived fashionably late to the office, but that day my phone didn’t ring.

6. Compound-Complex Sentence: 

The police were called, but by the time the blue and red lights splashed on his crumpled truck, he was already gone.

7. Conditional Sentence: 

I always believed that if he wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be able to go on. 

8. Relative Clause Sentence: 

The way he loved me was boundless.

9. Active Voice Sentence:

I didn’t deserve his love 

10. Passive Voice Sentence: 

I am haunted by the absence of him in our empty home.

11. Exclamatory Sentence: 

He made every day worth living for. 

12. Imperative Sentence: 

Stop dwelling on the past. 

The steady rain pitter-pattered on the window sill, its droplets tracing delicate paths down the glass, casting the trees into a haze of blurred, verdant streaks.

Mommy, can you slow down? I don’t understand, the girlish voice piped up from the toothless mouth. 

Her daughter's voice drew her back to the surface. Reality bubbled to the surface along with her. Colors re-emerged as she came out of the darkness. She glanced down at the paper in front of her and realized what she had written. 

She felt her cheeks grow hot. Her daughter's round eyes, sparkling with enough curiosity to light up an evening sky, peered deeply into her shameful ones. The fraction of a second she held her gaze felt like an eternity. She reached for the eraser before her daughter could question her behavior. She rubbed away the molten words she poured onto the page and swallowed, forcing the torrents back to their depths. 

Two tiny, soft arms wrapped halfway around her body and two feathery pigtails brushed against the heat of her cheeks. Can we do my homework outside Mommy? It is such a pretty day. 

The light of the sun twinkled in her daughter's eyes. But as she turned to face the window, all she could see beyond the glass pane was rain. 

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My kindest thanks to

Tommy Dixon

for helping me pull this short story together.

It has been a month since I last posted on Substack. It turns out that moving across a few state borders can be chaotic. Really chaotic. In the past four weeks, we have met some wonderful people, painted our house some funky colors, and learned how to (poorly) salsa dance. I’ve picked up crocheting (also poorly) in an effort to make some basic household items instead of relying on Amazon. I’ve gotten lost in the woods (twice). And I’m still living out of a suitcase.

I am happy to be back and I am happy you are here. I’ve missed writing and even more so I’ve missed this community.

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In the first half of this year, my reading list is digging deep into Transcendentalism. If you have any recommendations for me, please leave them in the comments below. Right now I am reading Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and I wanted to leave you with this:

Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the scultpor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stiumulates him to produce.

Emerson

Thanks for sticking with me. I will see you here next week.