The Red Grapes of Dementia In Fun Size — Blending the Line Between Fiction and Real Life
It was the beginning of some dark days for me in 2015. July through October were particularly frightening, as legions of dragons and demons from my past showed up. I didn’t know they had been lurking around my entire life. It came to a head that year.
As I began the long process of slaying some and vanquishing others, my writing was doing okay but not great. I was writing a memoir, The Grapes of Dementia: My Journey of Love, Loss, Surrender, and Gratitude, and was having a hard time of it.
Writing about a loved one’s illness and death is often about healing from the trauma and grief of it. While mending my broken psyche, my writing suffered. It came in short spurts of a sentence or two, if it happened at all.
I was overwhelmed and needed a brief break from reliving the past, but I still wanted to write.
That’s when I turned to flash fiction . . . sigh.
This was despite the fact that I don’t consider myself a good fiction writer . . . sigh.
My mind tends to think in polarities — either in nonfiction or whacked-out fantasy that doesn’t form into plot. Nothing in between. My imagination isn’t calibrated for fiction. And I don’t have much motivation to write it.
But here’s the thing about flash fiction . . . it’s short. So short that I thought I might be able to summon enough attention span to do it.
Flash fiction length ranges anywhere between just a few words to 1,000 or so. There isn’t a set number, so each publication that prints flash fiction gets to define for itself how many words are in a flash story.
Even so, there’s one thing flash pieces have in common. They all contain character and plot development. There’s an arc — a beginning, a middle, an end.
Should I try my hand at this? I muddled it over a bit.
Just then, and as fates usually have it, news of a local flash fiction contest fell into my lap. It was a sign, my go-ahead moment.
They wanted 99 words or less. There’d be 17 winners who’d be published in an upcoming issue of a regional newspaper. All righty then. Game on.
But what to write?
I had no idea.
Until I did.
My strategy was to use a real-life happening as a jumping-off place, then make up stuff as I went along.
I did okay. Of hundreds of entries, I was one of the 17 winners.
Here it is (and in case you’re wondering, it’s 95 words):
Grapes of Dementia
My husband lies in bed at the nursing home. I sit next to him. We munch on red grapes while he waits for sleep. I tear one from the stem, toss it to him, thinking he’ll catch it in his mouth. But it surprises him. We giggle. His eyes smile, mouth opens, a hungry baby bird. I toss another, lightly.
Caught!
He pitches one to me. Out of bounds. He pulls another, feeds it to me. We continue like this until he tires and sleeps.
Outdoors, the darkness mingles with the peace in my heart.
Admittedly, this is more of a flash personal essay. I took a longer composition (actually, part of my ebook-in-progress, The Grapes of Dementia) and edited the hell out of it until I met the 99 words or less criteria of the contest.
Here’s our proof that perhaps we’re more long-winded than we need to be (at least, maybe I am).
So while 85 words of my flash are true, only 10 of them are fiction . . . There was no peace in my heart that night, only despair mingled with grief.
Apparently I didn’t fool anyone. The local Alzheimer’s disease support group tracked me down and invited me to join them. I did. And one of the contest judges said:
I found it very moving and very immediate. I felt like I was in the room with them and sharing that moment when her husband and she fully connect for one more (possibly last) time.
She wasn’t far off.
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And if you really, really liked it, you might want to check out my ebook, The Grapes of Dementia: My Journey of Love, Loss, Surrender, and Gratitude, available through Amazon.
