Your Grandmother's Childhood

Today’s prompt: “Describe your grandmother’s childhood.”

Your grandmother wore flour sack dresses when she was little. She wished her mother didn’t always pick out the flour sacks with the ugliest floral prints, but somehow she found them every time.

Before she was very old, your grandma had to help out with housework and with younger siblings. But she still had opportunities to play. She had several rag dolls. Though her mom made doll clothes from the same flour sacks as your grandmother’s dresses, your grandma would often make her own fashionable gowns for her dolls from pliable green leaves bent and tied into flared skirts and stiff cap sleeves.

Your grandma was the best jacks player in the neighborhood.

The carnival came to town once for two weeks. It was the highlight of the year for your grandma – the games, the ferris wheel, the food smells – until one day near the end of the carnival’s stay when your grandma visited the fortuneteller’s tent. The fortuneteller told her she would one day have a grandchild who would die a gruesome death. The fortuneteller foresaw her grandchild on fire, flames licking their skin as they ran and ran from an angry mob. She described the way the burns spread hideously across your skin, the pain of the fire, the jeers and screams of the crowd. There was a strange glee to the fortuneteller’s description that your grandmother did not care for. She didn’t sleep well for about a week afterward. It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if everything else the fortuneteller predicted hadn’t come true within a year.