Short Story, Theme Prompt, Writing Challenge, Writing Prompts

What the Walls Kept Out: An Impossible Situation

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Great Minds Think Friday Challenge
where Rohini presents “An Impossible Situation:
Everyone hears their ancestors voices for a day”.
My story is about the brother I never got to know.

My father, my brother, my photo

My sister’s house was finally empty after our mother’s funeral, after the casseroles, after the visitors who said she lived a long life as if that settled anything. I’d been sifting through some of the things my mother had left me. In an old Gimbels’ shoebox wrapped in tissue paper gone brittle as moth wings, I found a photograph I’d never seen: my father, young and handsome in a wide-brimmed hat, holding a baby against his shoulder. 1942 was written on the back in pencil, in my mother’s careful hand.

I turned it over again. The baby wasn’t me; I was born in 1951.

That’s me, a voice said. Not in the room but inside me, the way a memory arrives, except this wasn’t a memory. I’m Frankie. I would have been your big brother.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, the photograph trembling slightly in my hand. I wasn’t frightened, not really. Of course, I knew about Frankie; my mother had a gilt-framed portrait of him on her dresser all her life. How could I have dismissed that memory?

I died when I was two, the voice said. Before our sister was born, before you. And I need you to know something, because you spent your whole life not knowing it, and I think it broke your heart a little, even if you never said so.

My eyes filled. I thought of every birthday my mother had attended without quite arriving …. present in the room, absent everywhere else. The homemade meals, the spotless house, the perfect report cards praised with a perfunctory nod. The way my mother had held my own children at arm’s length, like fragile packages she was afraid to damage.

She used to sing, Frankie said. I remember …. well, I don’t remember, not really, I was too small. But I know it the way you know things where you are now. She’d put her face right against mine and whisper ‘Ti voglio bene, Frankie. I love you very much’. She was warm, Nancy. She was so warm.

She never said those words to me.

“What happened to her?” I whispered, though I already knew …. the war, the government telegrams about “Deceased Dependent Child”, the husband drafted days after they buried their baby, the young woman left with an empty crib, an empty house, and a shattered heart.

She built a wall, Frankie said. To keep the pain out. Nobody tells you walls don’t work that way. They don’t know which way to keep things. The pain got in anyway …. it also kept everything else out. Including you. Including her.

I pressed the photograph to my chest. “I wish I’d known her. The way she was before.”

You did know her, Frankie said gently. She was always in there. You just couldn’t see past the walls to find her. That’s what I wanted you to hear …. not so you’d be sad. So you’d know it wasn’t your fault. And so maybe you can take the walls down in yourself, before it’s too late.

Frankie’s voice faded like a long breath exhaled. I sat alone with the photograph, and for the first time in my life, she let myself cry for a mother who had never learned how.

My Brother Frankie, 1941
My photo

NAR©2026

This is “Mother” by Pink Floyd

The Impossible Situation Challenge

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.



34 thoughts on “What the Walls Kept Out: An Impossible Situation”

  1. I know the feeling of having a mother that was inaccessible as the person she once was. The circumstances are totally different- but I to mourn the woman who was once my mother- the woman I never got to know. This is so beautifully told, Nancy.

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      1. I just used another old journal entry on my SLS for 7/5 and it is about my mom – a tiny peek at who she really was before she became the woman I knew, so this feeling was so fresh for me… ((hugs))

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    1. I’m sorry, Tiffany. It was hard growing up without a demonstrative mother, but no matter what I was going through, she had it tougher. I resented her for a long time, long after I had children of my own. As difficult as it was, I never showed resentment and I’m grateful for finally understanding why she was the way she was. I don’t think there was anything I could have done to change the way she felt. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. 🥰

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    1. It was a tremendous relief for me, my dear Keith. I’ve never shared quite so much about that day with anyone, not even my sister. She read it for the first time along with everyone else, and we talked on the phone and cried for an hour. It was cathartic, but the words came easy because they were from my heart. Thank you so very much. ❤️

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  11. Nancy, this was absolutely beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes and left me with goosebumps.
    The image of a mother building walls to survive her grief, only to find herself trapped behind them, is both heartbreaking and profoundly human.
    Frankie’s gentle voice felt like a gift of understanding, not only to the narrator but to every reader who has ever struggled to make sense of a parent’s distance.
    “Nobody tells you walls don’t work that way. They don’t know which way to keep things.” What a powerful truth. That line, and indeed this entire story, is going to stay with me for a very long time.
    Thank you for sharing such a moving and unforgettable story.

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    1. Rohini, I sent a copy of this to my sister; after reading, she immediately called and we talked and cried for over an hour. So many questions still remain, and we wonder what our lives would have been like if Frankie had lived or how different my mother might have been. Thank you, dear Rohini, for your most gracious comments; they made me cry anew. This was a tremendously emotional story to write … more than I ever thought it would be … and I’ll probably never write another one like this, but I embraced the opportunity. 🫶🏼

      One thing I did not get into, simply because it didn’t fit, was a little incident that happened when I was perhaps six years old. I was going through one of the drawers in my mother’s bedroom, as kids often do, and I found an old cigar box containing the softest pink sand and a small toy horse that walked when placed on an incline. I was fascinated by what I found, but when my mother discovered I had invaded her privacy, she was not thrilled. When she told me the sand was from Bermuda where she and my dad honeymoon and the toy belonged to her first baby who died, she became sad but I didn’t understand why. Of course, a few years later, it would all become clear.

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      1. Nancy, thank you for sharing this. Reading about the pink Bermuda sand and Frankie’s toy horse gave me goosebumps all over again. It’s amazing how childhood memories can sit quietly for years before their true meaning reveals itself.

        I never imagined the challenge would unlock something so deeply personal, but I’m grateful it gave you the space to tell this story. Your words touched me and many others so profoundly, and learning how much of it was rooted in your own life makes it all the more moving.

        Thank you for trusting us with it. I will carry this story and now this memory for a very long time.

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