The room is basic, functional.

Most of my day is spent staring out of the lone window.

Occasionally my son stops by. The visits are brief. I have nothing important to say and he is too busy to linger. Sometimes I ask him to fix something. The frustrated expression on his face tells me that I have lived long enough to be a burden.

It’s cold by the window in the evenings, like standing before an open refrigerator.

This year I spent money on a thicker coat at the thrift store. It doesn’t make my face any warmer or stop the frost that settles on the ledge, but it makes me look less poor on the rare day that I step out onto the street. Unless someone looks closely at my shoes. But no one does. No one cares.

Written in response to Rochelle’s Sunday Fictioneers challenge of 7 Sep 2018 prompted by a photo by Gah Learner

24 thoughts on “The Window”

  2. You let the character tell the story; it’s a bleak story but told without self-pity. You carefully describe significant details that give us the emotional atmosphere, most notably the way she values the thicker coat because it make her look less poor – as long as nobody looks at her shoes. And that takes you to your concluding sentence which is the focus of emotional intensity. “No one cares”
    I think you’ve written that story very well, and I like your clear, functional prose.

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  3. This is so bleak, I just wanna give him something to help put him out of his misery. Unlike Penny, I felt it was a man and was at the point that he no longer cares about anything

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  7. If you don’t mind my two cents (and you might and are therefore are humbly requested to pretend I never said it,)I think the last sentence is implied in the penultimate sentence (“No one does.”) I would stop there. As Penny said, no self-pity in this account. True, until that last sentence.

    Harsh conditions, bravely weathered, with no help from Junior.

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