Words of the Week

Here are today's Words of the Week and since I'm about to scoot off to take my son to school and then head to water aerobics, I'll have to post my short story later this afternoon.

Prompt: Use the following words in an original work: short story, poem, journal entry, etc.. Feel free to share your work in the comments section below.

Floe: A sheet of flowing ice
Gibber: Speak rapidly and unintelligibly
Kudos: Praise, honor
Parable: A story told to illustrate a moral
Contusion: Bruise, Injury
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Early November on the coast was already freezing. Out in the distance, a gaggle of seagulls bobbed on the water like a floe of jagged ice. It wouldn't surprise me to see ice already; it was bitter cold or maybe that was just the constant black cloud over my head doing my thinking for me again.

I gripped the old beat up copy of Ella and Emma and their adventures in the attic; the beloved parable my mother was most proud of. As a little girl, I'd read the same story and wondered how two seemingly bright little girls could get into so much trouble in an attic and why they needed so much trouble to learn the simplest of lessons. Life shouldn't hurt this much.

I was a doctor, I helped people from simple contusions to delicate cardiac surgeries. Now here I was six months pregnant, listening to the gibber of the cold ocean tides as if they held some secret I needed to know. When had life gotten so messy?

"Momma," Max said, tugging on the sleeve of my sweater. He looked so much like his father in that instant I felt my heart slam into my chest.

"It's too cold out here for us." I took his hand and started back up the beach toward the road.

"Momma sad. Max loves Momma." He clapped his hands together and looked up at me with his father's big brown eyes.

For just a moment, that was all the kudos I needed to remember just how lucky I was despite what our family was going through.