Sunday Serial: 280 x 70, 40. Last Day of the Academic Year by Gill James, ice-cream soda

 Introduction

This collection is a collection of seventy stories, each 280 words. They were inspired by the first picture seen on my Twitter feed on a given day.

They're off to school for the last time this academic year and it’s warm enough for them to be in T-shirts and shorts. They giggle. There's going to be an "it's-a-knockout" challenge. Then they'll be shown their classrooms for next year. How nice. Then they'll sort out things to bring home from the tired display.

But my freedom's gone now.  I'll miss the sweet lull after the storm, being able to sit with a coffee and the newspapers, getting the housework done quickly and then spending hours at my desk until it's time for them to come home.

How am I going to keep them busy and happy all day every day? Shall we do nature walks? Collect things? Do little projects? Can I take them swimming? We'll go for a few days to Granny and Grandpa for sure. There will be the bluebell woods at the bottom of the garden and Granny will surely do some baking with them. We'll raid the local library.  On rainy days we can make things.  Maybe we'll go to the cinema a couple of times.

It'll cost a little, though won’t it? And then we'll also have to get ready for the new school year. They grow so much and I guess they’ll shoot up even more over the summer.

It's time to go. They mustn't be late, even on the last day of term. They skip along, greeting their friends as we meet them along the way. Even the teachers look cheerful. Well, they'll have a rest tomorrow and the sun is lovely today.

I catch their excitement. Six whole weeks now away from the desk and spending time with my children.              

About the author

Gill James is published by The Red Telephone, Butterfly and Chapeltown. She edits CafeLit and writes for the online community news magazine: Talking About My Generation. She teaches Creative Writing and has an MA in Writing for Children and PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. 

http://www.gilljameswriter.com 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B001KMQRKE 

https://twitter.com/GillJames 

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Young Love by Phyllis Souza, ice-cream soda

 

 

It's 1952. I'm fifteen years old, and I'm in love with Johnny.

 

Johnny is sixteen. Every day around four o'clock in the afternoon, he drives his dad's old green pickup down Pioneer Boulevard past my house.

 

Sitting on the front porch, I have on jeans, not any ol' pair of jeans, boys' Levi's, legs rolled to just below my knees. My feet are bare, nice, except for my toes. They're long, 'piano toes.'

 

It's 3:45. My heart's beating fast. I have a red scarf tied around my ponytail—a signal for Johnny to stop.

 

"I love you," I murmur.

 

Here he comes. I can see the pickup. I feel a leap in my chest.

 

Johnny honks.

 

I'm oh, so thrilled.

 

He keeps going. "Come back. Come back."

 

I walk into the house. "Next time, he'll stop. I know he will."

 

A couple of weeks later.

 

I pick up the telephone on the table next to our rose-colored sofa. We have a two-party line. I listen. It's some stupid woman talking to another stupid person. It makes me mad. I slam down the receiver. Doesn't she know that somebody else might want to use the phone?

 

Five minutes later, again, I pick up the phone, and the ladies are still yacking. Then, I hear, "Goodbye."

 

The phone line is clear. So, I lay on the couch and pray. "Please, God, let Johnny call."

 

The phone rings. It's Johnny!

 

He asks me, the girl with the long toes and hair pulled into a ponytail with a red scarf, for a date to go to the show. Not to a theater, but a drive-in movie. That's where couples make out.

 

"Hold on. I'll have to ask," I say.

 

I put down the receiver. I can't stand it. I'm so happy.

 

I run to the kitchen.

 

My mother is crying. Not really. She's peeling an onion.

 

"Johnny's on the phone. He asked me to go to a movie. Can I? Please. Can I go?" I clasp my hands. "I'll wash the dishes. Fold the clothes. Please. Anything."

 

"Yes, but only if you take your cousin, Sally, along."

 

Sally's my buddy, and I think it's okay.

 

A few seconds later, I'm back on the phone.

 

"Great. It's a date," Johnny says.

 

Saturday evening rolls around. 7:00.

 

Johnny drives his black and white Ford into the driveway. He gets out of his car—knocks on the front door. Takes one look at Sally.

 

"Wow!" Johnny's in love.

 

I hate Johnny. And I'm not too fond of my cousin, Sally, either.

About the author

 Phyllis Souza lives in Northern California. After she retired from a long real estate career, she took online writing classes. Her stories have been published in: The Drabble, The Raven Perch, Spillwords, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Friday Flash Fiction

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Pink Shoes

 

By Jane Spirit

raspberry-ripple ice-cream soda 

Yvonne knew that Louise wasn’t to blame for leaving the ballerina style shoes propped up by the front door during her regular Saturday visit. Louise had just collected them from a friend who had said she could borrow them for a work do. She had planned to wear them in a little whilst she sat and chatted with Yvonne, but then it had slipped her mind to put them on. It had been such a warm day for April, and they had taken their coffees out to the little patio table, talking whilst they admired the camellia’s bursting buds. As usually happened, Louise had lost track of time, until she had glanced at her phone and jumped up. She had given Yvonne a quick hug and hot footed it out to her car through the side gate, closing it firmly behind her. Only after she had eaten her sandwich for lunch did Yvonne spot the shoes in the hall. Pink had always been her favourite colour and it made the temptation to try them on almost irresistible.

Once she had slipped them on to her feet it was the work of a moment to pick up her little navy bag and rain jacket and step out into the front garden. The shoes were a perfect fit. It was truly like walking on air and she had to glance down to make sure that she really did have shoes on as she opened the metal gate. She was a little breathless with her daring as she regarded their blush pinkness and their soft shape; her joy was only slightly clouded by guilt.

She turned automatically to the right and could feel herself growing younger with every step. The colour rose to her cheeks as she dared once again to look down. She thought of how, on this sunny day, the shoes gave just the right hint of pink on a white satin. They were the exact shade of the ballet shoes that she had treasured in her kit bag as a young girl setting out to walk just the few minutes from her childhood home to the hall where her ballet classes had been held.

Yvonne walked on past the park railings, listening to the children calling out to each other as they played. She remembered again her own childhood in a seaside town.  Even on cold days her parents had insisted on taking their family out with a picnic. She could still picture the garish bubble gum pink stripes of the wind shield that her parents had struggled to carry on to the sands before proudly unfurling it like some ancient heraldic emblem to claim their territory on the beach. On especially lucky summer days they would be allowed to play on until tongues of orange-pink sunset flames had begun to lick the greying edges of the sea. For Yvonne the scene had taken on Biblical proportions. It was in keeping with the painting in the church to which her mother sometimes took her with its masses of white-robed angels. Their wings were tinged salmon-pink by the fiery beams falling from a heaven revealed above them.

Thinking about it all and carried along by the comfort of the slip-on shoes, Yvonne had quickened her usual pace. Now she found that thinking about the angels’ feathery wings whirling upward into a celestial orbit had made her feel a little off balance herself. She was close to the little café where she often ended her afternoon walk these days and decided to pause there. Sitting upright in her chair whilst she drank her cup of tea, she smiled at her dainty little feet as they peeped out at her in all their pinkness. She was content just to think that, had the tea shop listed raspberry-ripple ice-cream sodas on its menu, she would have ordered one and asked for some extra raspberry sauce to be squirted on top to form a synthetic cerise crown.

Of course, Yvonne knew that the past she had been enjoying on her walk had not really been all that it seemed, just as she had to admit that the shoes were not quite as comfortable as she had first thought. Her memories were a sugar frosted version of the mundane adult world that she had been bound to inherit. When her feet had grown too big for the beautiful ballet shoes her parents had not been able to afford to buy her new ones and the ballet lessons had come to an end soon after that. The days at the beach had been a way of taking her parents’ minds off the exigencies and difficulties of their life together. The differences between them were never really resolved, however much her mother went to pray.

The shoes were beginning to rub her feet a little as she concluded her walk home from the café, but she was still reluctant to relinquish them. The thought of the sherbet-pink embroidered bed jacket that Louise had bought her for her birthday still troubled her. She knew that it had been meant kindly and yes it was a lovely colour, but its wholesomeness had somehow marked for Yvonne the beginning of an inevitable decline into frailty that she would rather not acknowledge. She knew that she must resist predictability. She would buy herself some new shoes that could not in any sense be described as sensible. Having made that promise to herself she turned the key in the lock, grateful in the end to be home. As the door opened, her phone started to ring. It would almost certainly be Louise arranging to pop round for what she had forgotten. Yvonne braced herself to answer the call and looked down at her feet for one last time in fond farewell. She took off her shoes at the door.

About the author 

Jane Spirit lives in Suffolk and has written academic articles and edited academic books from time to time, but has only recently ventured into writing fiction.

 

 

 

Ice Cream Girl

by Jerry Guarino

an ice-cream soda 

 

 Remember the song that played on summer afternoons, as the truck pulled into the neighborhood?  It was the clear sign that the ice cream man was here.  All the kids would run over and get in line, holding a dollar from their mom or dad, ready to get a push pop, ice cream sandwich or another of the dozens of treats pictured on the van.

             That large ice cream truck has been replaced by a motorized tricycle with a small freezer, no bigger than a golf cart and no longer driven by a man looking like Captain Kangaroo.  No, now the treats were delivered by a young girl, in her teens with a long pony tail, cut off shorts and tie dye t-shirt, the ice cream girl.

            Marley (vegan dog) and Jeri (stoned cat) were the first to notice her, hiding in the bushes hoping to get a treat dropped by a young child. 

             “Marley, what’s happening?”

             “See that girl, handing out ice creams.  Her name is Nikki.  And that boy holding the child’s hand is Tommy.  He likes Nikki, but he’s afraid to ask her out.”

             “They would make a cute couple.  Can we help them get together?”

             Jeri tilted her head.  “I’ve got an idea.”  She bumped into a little girl, who dropped her ice cream cone.  The girl started to cry.  Jeri was quick to lap up the vanilla treat.  Tommy stepped up.

             “Don’t cry little girl.”  He handed Nikki a dollar.  “Please give her another cone.”  The little girl smiled with gratitude.  Nikki was smiling too.

             “That’s very kind of you.  I’m Nikki.”

             “I’m Tommy.  No little one should lose their ice cream.”

             Marley smiled.  “Well done, Jeri.”

             “I think we need to do more.  Tommy isn’t asking her out.”  So, Marley and Jeri recruited Larry Bird (the cockatoo) to follow Nikki and Duck to follow Tommy and find out more about them.

    The next week, the birds came back with their report.

             “Well, if we’re going to get these two together, Tommy is going to have to know something about Nikki.”

             “What?”

             “Well, she just broke up with a boy who was cheating on her.  She won’t stand for that.”

             “Of course, most girls wouldn’t.”

             “But that’s not all.  He was cheating on her with her mom.  She caught them making out in the house when she got back from her ice cream job.”

             “Oh my!  That’s got to hurt.”

             “Yes, so Tommy shouldn’t push her into a relationship right now.  She needs time to recover emotionally.”

             “Duck, you’ve been following Tommy.  What’s his state of mind?”

             “Not good.  Tommy’s been getting ready to ask her out, even going over to her house to do it in person.”

             “That could blow up big time.  If he happened to be there alone with her mom, waiting for Nikki to come in.”

             “We have to follow Tommy and intercept him.  He can’t go over there yet.”

             So, Marley, Jeri and the birds tailed Tommy.

             Soon, they found him buying flowers and walking towards Nikki’s house.  Nikki was finishing her ice cream route, so he would get there before she came home.  Disaster.

             Marley rolled around in some mud, then ran up against Tommy’s pants. 

             “Argh.  Damn dog.  Now I have to go home and change.”

             Crisis averted for the moment.  Tommy would have to wait another day.

             The next day, Tommy tried again, but Larry landed on Tommy’s shoulder.

             “Hey.  Get off me.”  But Larry just smiled and stood there.  Tommy tried to shake him off, but to no avail.  And duck walked in front of Tommy, interrupting his gait.

             “What is this, a Hitchcock movie?”

             Larry started pecking his neck while duck nipped at his ankles.

             Tommy screamed and ran home.  One more day of relief for Nikki, but the animals knew they couldn’t keep Tommy away forever.

             He decided that a lesser gesture might be more effective.  No flowers, no showing up at Nikki’s house.  He would just approach her at the ice cream truck.

             The next day, he waited behind the little kids getting their treats.  Marley, Jeri and the others watched quietly from a safe distance.  When he was the last one there, he handed Nikki a dollar.

             “May I please have a creamsicle?”

             Nikki smiled and handed him the frozen treat.  “Of course, Tommy.  I haven’t seen you here in a while.”

             “I’ve been thinking about the future.  How have you been?”

             “Well, I had a problem with my old boyfriend, but I’m over that now.”

             “I’m glad to hear that.  Would you like to talk about it?”

             “Maybe we could.  What are you doing later on?”

             “Not much.  Can we meet down by the beach for a burger?”

             “I’d like that Tommy.  Six o’clock good?  I’ll bring the dessert.”

             Tommy and Nikki smiled.

About the author

Jerry Guarino’s short stories have been published by dozens of magazines in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. His latest book, "Café Stories: west coast stories", is available on Amazon.com and as a Kindle eBook. Please visit his website at http://cafestories.net