One-Sentence Story: Beautiful, Perfect, and Brand New

Chabot Valley by Richard Diebenkorn

They lived in a housing tract, where all the houses looked alike from the outside, but inside was a different story, like Maude didn’t have any of her own kids, plus she had MS so she was in a wheelchair, and when he was staying at her house in the afternoons, he had to be all alone in the basement, where he had nothing to do but wait for three hours until his father came—well, maybe there were a few Lincoln Logs down there—and he felt just like a prisoner in a dungeon (his mother had been able to come home for one weekend but she cried too much so then they said she had to go back to the hospital) but the other lady he stayed with in the afternoons had a kid, and they were allowed to sit with her upstairs at the kitchen table in a cozy nook, where Northern California sun gleamed in through the windows, and she let them help her glue popsicle sticks into Christmas decorations and spray paint them with gold and silver and sprinkle them with glitter (the only popsicle sticks he’d seen before were inside popsicles, but she had thousands and thousands of popsicle sticks, and they were just beautiful, so perfect and brand new), and making things with popsicle sticks was her hobby, not something she was doing just to keep them busy (she probably didn’t have cancer while she was making things with popsicle sticks—or maybe she did), but no matter where he was staying, at the end of the day his father would pick him up, and collect his sister from wherever she was staying, and his older brother would come home, too, and then his father would cook dinner for the four of them, usually something disgusting like hot dogs and white bread and tomatoes and milk all cooked together in a casserole, but he would finish without complaining (his mother wasn’t such a great cook either, and once when she made liver and onions, he refused, saying “I’d rather eat dog food!” and then he got out the Purina Dog Chow, poured himself a bowl and ate it).

by Nina Zolotow

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