A Story for You

I recently pulled out my old binder of my short stories and started reading through it. I have a bunch in there that I really feel pulled to start working on again, and hopefully sharing some of them here. I found this one in the back, in the section for beginnings and very short stories. I laughed and thought it was silly, but Justin was entertained. So, here it is. I'm not sure when I wrote it, maybe 13 or 14 years ago.

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When I was little, my grandma used to tell me stories about when she was a girl. We would sit there together in her cozy living room, with the old fashioned futons and her old CD player, and she would play her favorite oldies for me. I guess that's how I got hooked on artists like Sarah McLachlan, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Matchbox Twenty. Most of my friends think I'm kind of crazy - none of them walk around listening to the oldies stations - but I find most nineties music much more appealing than the new single from Blue Fungus or the other "bands" that are popular now. I don't think that their music is very talented, especially compared to how music used to be. Grandma was a beautiful woman. Sometimes after she told me a story we'd get out her old photo album. Back when she was young, a lot of girls had long, flowing hair. Sometimes when I'm looking in the mirror, I wonder what it would be like to have hair. I picture myself with long, red, curly hair, or short blonde hair like Grandma used to have. When I was younger, we lived in a colony where there was a five o clock curfew every night, because that's when the Cybots would come out. They figured the earlier everyone was in their own houses, the less crime would go on. So, I used to go to Grandma's house in the evenings, and sneak back home through a hole we'd made in the hedges. We don't live there anymore, so now I can visit Grandma whenever I want, in the new colony we don't have to be home until nightfall...

I remember the day that someone told me that it was time for Grandma to go. To stop the overpopulation problem, the authorities decided that if anyone were to live to the age of sixty, they would have to be put to sleep and sent out into space. They stopped burying people in the ground a long time ago, there was much too much space being taken up for cemeteries. Now we have grieving chambers. You can go into the small, dark room, usually they hold two or three people, and see where your loved on is by a camera that is attached to the body before it is shot into space. The camera's self powered battery usually lasts about five months, and after that the film is just part of the Hall of Records and you can go view it anytime you want to.

It was October 3, 2045. Grandma's birthday was on the fifth, and we all knew what would happen. On this particular afternoon, we had decided to have a coming to peace party for her. She had lived a full life, but Grandma wasn't even sick or weak. I was seventeen years old, old enough to fully understand what was going on. I had been thinking about losing Grandma for the past couple of years. I didn't know what I'd do without her. She was my best friend, and she had been like a second mother to me. We all gathered in her backyard that afternoon, and we had an old fashioned barbecue like they had when she was younger. I don't know how she got a hold of an old charcoal powered grill, but it was so much fun! We cooked our protein patties an some long skinny things that Grandma called protein dogs. She said when she was a kid, they used to barbecue real meat, and they had things called hamburgers and hot dogs. They used to eat them with fresh vegetables too! I had never even had meat, by the time I was born, there was only the protein substitutes that we eat now. There had been problems with all the cattle when a terrible disease spread through the world, and now the only cows were in the animal containment museums. We rarely had fresh vegetables either. When Grandma was young, they'd had a garden, and they'd been able to grown their own vegetables too. She told me about how sweet and crisp the onions tasted, and how good the tomatoes were when they were just right. Id' only seen pictures of these things, but somehow Grandma had managed to get some fresh onion, lettuce, and tomato for our barbecue.

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It was really hard to type that up without editing it, and even just doing that I had a couple of ideas. Maybe I'll work on it.