Laura Brooker Manning
Stories (2/0)
Our Little Black Book
I close my laptop with a sigh of relief. My little black book full of notes and scribbles still sits open on my desk. I look at the photograph to the right of my laptop, the one I look at every day. “I’m done”, I say to the image of the two of us smiling and eating ice cream: Ella with no hair and me with some sort of braid. The picture was taken the day Ella shaved her head…
By Laura Brooker Manning3 years ago in Humans
Cries of the Barn Owl
Yesterday was my tenth birthday. Normally, I would have woken up to my two older brothers, Seth & Jason, singing their embarrassing birthday version of “Lovely Rita” except they change the lyric “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” to “Lovely Leda, Birthday Girl”. Then, my dad would make his “special birthday pancakes” which really just means they have sprinkles. And that night, we would all go to dinner at my favorite restaurant, “Rocco’s Waterfront”. But, none of that happened this year. Instead, here we all are dressed in black, staring at my father’s cherrywood casket. “Cherrywood is a classic”, that’s what the man at the funeral home told us. “It’s a bit richer than the mahogany, but you really can’t go wrong with any of the darker woods.” He made it sound as if we were picking out new cabinets for the kitchen.
By Laura Brooker Manning3 years ago in Families