Writing prompt attempt #1

What I’m Reading: Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

What I’m working on: Motivating myself to finish.

New Words Today: 100

Here's my attempt at yesterday's promt. Enjoy.

“An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart.” This is the opening line of a short prose piece you are to write, meditating on an unsolved mystery in your own life. You can transpose this into purely fictional terms.

An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart.

Imagine what a dozen must be.

The old hope chest housed at least a dozen mysteries. At least.

Melissa categorized its contents into two piles: okay, I knew this about my mom and what-the-hell.

It was the what-the-hell pile causing her hands to tremble. At least she hadn’t found this stuff before the funeral. If she had, what would she have said?

How about I loved my mother, the woman that was apparently married at least once before dad?

Or huh, for what it’s worth, it seems we’ve been celebrating the wrong wedding anniversary for my long deceased father and recently deceased mother. It seems that that they weren’t married in January after all. Their marriage license says June. Yes, that’s right. I came along pretty quickly after that.

When she’d offered to sort through this old stuff alone, she’d expected to find some newspaper clippings and year books from her mother’s high school days. Her mom been the head cheerleader and student council VP. Melissa expected to find the veil her mother wore when she married her dad. But she’d found three veils, three different wedding invitations to three different men, and a wedding ring that obviously didn’t belong to her mother or her grandmother. Or, hell. Maybe it did.

What she found made no sense. The woman who was supposed to have been an open book was instead shrouded in mystery.

The what-the-hell pile made the chaos of Melissa’s life look pretty damn tame.

She ought to let this go – just let the garbage truck haul off the junk. Her mom had hidden these secrets and letting them lie seemed the most respectful course of action.

But the anger boiling up would never let Melissa leave it be. Besides, discovering her mother’s secrets might diminish her own secrets a bit. And wasn’t it about time for that?