FREE SHORT STORIES!

Read 'em in an hour or less!

Hello, all! I’m excited to be part of another BookFunnel giveaway: The Short Story Smorgasbord.

Featuring:

You can find them all on BookFunnel: Short Story Smorgasbord!

Lean Love is featured there, as is my new free short story, Chicken in the Oven, which is below.

Enjoy!

A young girl freaks out when she learns her dad tore a page from her diary filled with awkward drawings and desperately tries to cover it up by pretending it's a cookbook. As her frantic cover-up spirals, she battles the absurd guilt of both being "caught" and potentially going to hell for drawing too many boobs.

I am sitting on the edge of my mom’s bed, my legs swinging and bouncing off the padding of the mattress.

“Daddy doesn’t want me to tell you this,” she starts and waits for me to say something. There’s nothing more she loves than having a secret to tell.

“Well, what is it?” I ask.

“Are you sure you want to know?” she teases the information in front of me. She just woke up from one of her daily naps, and her face is still creased with pillow lines.

“Yes!” I say excitedly, “why doesn’t he want me to know?”

“Well, it has to do with something private. Oh, I don’t know if I should tell you,” she says. She is a typical sieve-mouth.

“Just tell me! Tell me!” I say and wave my arms up and down. There is nothing I hate more than not being in the know, especially on the cusp of adolescence.

“Daddy ripped out one of the pages in your diary and he saw a few pages.”

My cheeks burn.

“Which diary?” I ask.

“The pink one that was stuffed in one of the drawers in the coffee table.”

“Why did he rip a page out?” I ask, my tone growing desperate.

“He needed the corner,” she said.

My dad has a habit of skipping dental floss and going straight for ripping the corners of whatever is lying around and closest to him: old photos, magazines, printer paper, in order to clean the spaces in his teeth. But why did it have to be the corner of this pink diary? I have a bajillion other diaries strewn about the house that also have corners far less incriminating than the pink diary. We have drawers full of drug store printed photo with corners begging to be ripped off. We have dollar store spiral notebooks with those sturdy cardboard covers perfect for picking out stubborn food! And printer paper that isn’t even in the printer! All he had to do was walk less than a foot to get fresh printer paper!

My heart pounds against my tiny chest. I wipe my clammy hands on pastel Soffe shorts. Blood rushes into my cheeks and the room starts to spin.

“What page?” I squeak.

“He said something about drawings?” she said.

This is bad news. I know that she knows and he knows. I also know that as much as I wish I could be as inconspicuous brother who talks his way out of anything, that ultimately, I am not a child that can play it cool.

“It’s a cookbook,” I say quickly.

My mom narrows her eyes at me.

“Okay? That’s not what he told me,” she sings in her deep I-can-sniff-you-out-like bloodhound tone.

I panic and run out of her room and into the living room, the evidence on the table. The pink diary.

“Dad!” I yell at him.

He is in his usual spot, laying down on the living room floor, head propped up on the end of the couch with a decorative pillow, and the clicker in left hand, and his right hand down his pants.

He isn’t saying anything, and stares behind me at the television.

“You need floss,” I whine.

“I didn’t know,” he mumbles, “I’m sorry. I told your mom to not–”

“Dad! UGH!”

I grab the diary and dart into my room and start tearing out all the fluorescent pink pages and rip them into a million little shreds. If I could, I would burn them, I would even set fire to myself at this moment. I do not want to exist anymore. I put the little shreds of paper in a neat pile and mix them up as much as possible, in case someone gets into our trash and tries to piece the bits of paper together. If they found the drawings, they would know that a gross pervert lives here. I then turn to the empty pages left in the diary. I write in my best printed pencil, “Caity’s Recipes.” I then switch to a black pen. If there is different colored ink in the diary, it will look

like I have written the recipes over a long period of time, because it will look like I picked up where I left off in whatever writing tool was next to me. Then, my mom will not believe what my dad told her was in the diary. “Chicken in the Oven” I write. “Ingredients” I write, switching to a blue pen, and I write out the ingredients. She’ll never know I’m doing this all now. I even draw out pictures of chicken so that there will be drawings in the notebook as well. I’ll tell her that Dad didn’t understand the food drawings.

When I finish three recipes I run to show my mom who is still in bed and now reading a paperback romance.

“See mom,” I say, “it’s a cookbook.”

“Oh,” she says, “very nice.”

She flips through the pages in two seconds and hands it back to me.

“It’s nothing more than a cookbook. That’s it!” I reason.

“Okay, Caity I believe you,” my mom says.

“Mom, really. That’s all it is. It’s a cookbook. You can read it anytime you want!”

“It’s okay, Cait. Leave me alone. I want to read for a bit,” she says, not looking up from her book.

“Mom, it’s not okay! I need you to believe me!”

“Caity, I said I believe you! I want to relax. Go watch TV with your dad,” she says.

I have a sinking feeling that she might just be saying that. I can tell she’s over talking about the diary, but my brain continues to obsess over it. I run back into my room and wish I could disappear, but I have to live with the fact that my mom and dad know about my sex drawings. Those now torn up pages had my diagrams of penises, and next to them, arrows pointing to vaginas. I drew more vaginas than penises. I knew that vaginas all looked a little different from my secret research on sex.com. Vaginas without hair like mine, and vaginas with hair. I also drew boobs. Okay, I drew a lot of boobs. I practiced boobs almost every day. They come in a lot of different sizes, shapes, and colors. But they weren’t always naked, sometimes I even drew boobs underneath shirts, copying the breasts I see the 8th grade girls have. Seeing boobs makes my tummy feel weird in a good way. But I know that drawing and feeling good about boobs and vaginas is sinful and that, maybe, I’ll have to confess it in church soon. I would rather die than say, “I draw boobs and vaginas because it feels good,” to Father Chris. I know I’ll go to hell if I don’t say anything, but if I stop obsessing over it, then the good feeling will go away forever. I will pray extra hard and make my own penance.

I vow then and there I would only write in a diary if I was okay with it eventually being discovered one day, likely never again by my mom or dad, but an aunt or my future child. So, I take the ripped up pieces of sex drawings and wrap them up in layers of paper towel before throwing it in the trash. I then put dish soap on top of the paper towels. Should I open up the paper towels and put dish soap on the torn drawings also? No, no. No one would go that far. I then go back to my room and clear out a space in my closet where I can sink down and disappear for a while. I slide the door closed and hug my knees in the cool darkness. I figure if I stay here and don’t make a sound, they’ll forget about me just like I want to forget about everything else.