When I say I wrote a first fiction short story, actually it's the start of a fiction short story. I leave it to you to continue the story. Now is your chance to take the characters I've created and lead them in the direction you want.
Here is my story start. Please do give us your words to finish or continue this story. Have fun with it.
Lunch at Aunt Hattie's
Dressed in her Sunday best navy blue suit with white buttons, Janey Marie Newbrough lies in repose in the parlor of Aunt Hattie's funeral home. Her viewing isn't for another three hours, enough time for Aunt Hattie to make soup for lunch.
Aunt Hattie's white, traditional, two-story, clapboard home, on the corner of Benton and Carlisle streets in the Ozark mountain town of Calhoun, is not only her home but also the town's single remaining funeral home. Aunt Hattie, known by that name everywhere in town, stirs the vegetable soup in her cast iron pot, which is filled almost to overflowing. She uses only the freshest vegetables picked from her garden in the back, bordering the now-empty chicken coop. It's early autumn and the vegetable choices are limited, but she finds enough for the soup. And amazingly there are a few red tomatoes for sandwiches to round out the lunch menu, along with sweet iced tea and buttermilk pie.
"Doing OK there, Janey Marie," she asks, absent-mindedly turning toward the casket in the living room.
Running a funeral home full-time takes all the energy Aunt Hattie can muster. She isn't young anymore, 82 on her birthday last month. Her arthritis acts up daily, and her once-erect posture now more closely resembles someone looking at the new pair of shoes she just put on. The kids are grown and lead their own lives far away from the funeral home. Taking care of Calhoun's dearly departed grows more tiresome each day. Her husband Jess died years ago and she misses him greatly, not only for the work he did in their business, but also for the companionship and the caring he so generously displayed.
Today, Aunt Hattie wants everything to be first rate for her company. Never mind that Janey Marie's viewing will occur shortly and townspeople will be streaming through to pay their respects to a woman who was not only known to so many through community connections, she also taught most of them in the small schoolhouse just blocks away. No need for Aunt Hattie to be involved in the viewing other than to provide the location for it. That gives her the freedom to keep her mind on lunch.
Louise Kathlyn and Lynnie Renee, Aunt Hattie's cousins two times removed, soon will arrive from downstate. She wants to make them as comfortable as possible, knowing that Lynnie isn't the most relaxed person around the dead, especially when one is lying only a few feet away from the kitchen table.
Further, it doesn't help the atmosphere when Ellie Mahoney, clearly the oldest resident of Calhoun, is raking the leaves out back. Shrunken and stooped, she is clothed in a black ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved shirt, with her long braids peeking out beneath a tall bonnet. She looks more like someone from the end of the 19th century and perhaps more likely to be in a box in the parlor than moving about outside. Janey Marie in the parlor and Ellie out back do not exactly contribute to the surroundings Aunt Hattie had in mind for her family, who only visits every 10 years or so.
Lynnie walked in the front door. Without missing a beat, she blurted out, "How nice. A stiff in the parlor and a crone from the Taft era out back will really enhance our enjoyment of lunch, Hattie dear."
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