Flash

Obsolete

Nancy's Notes 🖊️🎶

Written for Friday Fictioneers where our host
Rochelle asks us to use the photo below as inspiration
to write creatively in 100 words or less while
making every word count. This is my flash.

Photo Prompt © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

Tenderly, Abe placed all his late wife’s treasures into a shoebox. Each one held a memory.

Abe’s daughter recently told him she was selling the house, moving into a condo just big enough for her and her daughter; Abe would have to move into assisted living. Slowly he walked to his room, cradling the box. Nearing his granddaughter’s bedroom, he heard her talking on the phone.

“My mom said bat mitzvah is outdated. I’m not doing it.”

Abe’s eyes filled with tears. Turning, he walked outside and dumped his wife’s box of treasures into the garbage. He suddenly felt obsolete.

NAR©2024
100 Words

This is “The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic

6 December 2024

All text, graphics and videos are copyright for Nancy (The Sicilian Storyteller), The Sicilian Storyteller, The Elephant’s Trunk and The Rhythm Section and are not to be used without permission. NAR©2017-present.

45 thoughts on “Obsolete”

      1. The thing that got me was at the end, where he’s throwing all his wife’s treasures out. In my family, anything left behind by a late relative is treated like a sacred relic. Seriously, I have a box of stuff that belonged to my great-grandfather that he probably would have thrown out if he hadn’t died first. It was in an old Marshall Field’s gift box that was falling apart. I bought a plastic box to keep the stuff in, because I knew that, if I threw it away, one of aunts would call and say “Do you have that box of Etaba’s (their name for him) things, like his Knights of Columbus sash?”

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        1. Thanks for sharing you personal story, John. I know where you’re coming from.

          In my story, Abe knew how important family and traditions were to his wife. She cherished them. He felt the same way. If his wife had lived long enough to feel the sting their daughter’s disregard for the elderly in the family and their granddaughter’s disinterest in making bat mitzvah, it would have destroyed her. Throwing her precious treasures in the garbage is symbolic of the end of an era, a time when traditions and family mattered.

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