A Story - "Comfort Food" and Lights like a Winter Garden

A Story

Comfort Food

Shelly packed her sports bag with her clothes and taped up her memory box. Her mother had already filled some boxes with their other possessions. They travelled light. It was too much work to deal with more than the essentials.

Later that afternoon, they stepped into their new apartment.  Hardly new, though.  The floor was cracked, scratched parquet. The kitchen cupboards were flimsy cheap wood with crooked hinges. In the bathroom, the bath was pink but the toilet was white, the sink cream coloured.  Shelly would be sharing the bedroom with her mom. Two single beds filled the space with barely room for the rack they hung their clothes on.

At school the next day, Shelly tried to blend into her desk, but at the first lunch hour one of the girls, who had a gaggle of friends around her, came up to her and laughed at her cheap clothes and well-worn lunch bag. It was going to be a miserable year just like the one before.

On her way home from school, she stopped at the corner store and bought a couple of chocolate bars and a bag of barbecue chips. That was all she could afford.

Curled up on her bed waiting for her mother to come home from work, Shelly slowly ate her chocolate bars, savouring the sweetness and the smoothness as they melted in her mouth. A feeling of warmth crept over her like a hug. She licked her fingers and popped open the bag of chips. Salty and spicy the chips crunched as she bit into them. She crushed them like she wanted to crush the bully girls at school.

After she finished the chips, she flattened out the chocolate bar wrappers and the chip bag and put them at the bottom of her memory box. Letters from her best friends.

The sparkling lights of the town across the bay are like flowers in a winter garden.  They are cheerful to see in the dark winter months.