Sarah Lockwood
Stories (3)
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The Bacon
I knew it was too early to sneak out of camp, but no one hardly paid me any mind anyway. I was just the drummer boy… or at least they all thought I was a boy. I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter so long as no one found out. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I sure did want to fight in that war… and I liked pants. I liked pants even better than the split riding skirt my aunt Josephine had sent me once, though I liked that pretty well.
By Sarah Lockwood5 years ago in Fiction
Dear Diary, I Lied
“Dear Diary,” That’s how I always started my writings in my beat up old notebook… I don’t know why, nostalgia, I guess. Maybe I just wanted to be like a “normal” teenager from back in the day. Back when you went to the store to buy things, instead of to scavenge, and hope the items you needed hadn’t already been pillaged or destroyed. Back when cars where for driving and showing off, not for dodging behind and using for cover. Back when… yeah, back in the day. It really hadn’t been that long ago, six months, maybe a little less. How quickly the city had become mayhem. I remembered it like it was a million year ago, like a lifetime ago. The EMP, electromagnetic pulse, that had knocked out communication systems, then the air strikes that had taken out the power grids. There were rumors of country places that were still living like normal, that faraway from the cities life went on like it had before. That other countries had power, and phones, and television. There was no way to confirm that, though, so we scavenged what we could, fought others off, and survived. Waiting for confirmation that we weren’t the last people on earth. No one in our crowd knew what had caused the EMP or the airstrikes. Dillion thought it was aliens, Cassy said it was the Russians (her words: “it’s always the damn Russians.”). Eddie said it was our own government, showing other cities around the country what would happen if they tried to rebel (“…how else do you explain the fact that there’s no help coming from anywhere?”). I thought it was miserable. I thought it was Hell, and I didn’t care where it came from, I just wanted out.
By Sarah Lockwood5 years ago in Fiction
Grandma's Not-for-Paper Scissors
Life doesn’t always go the way you planned it. That’s just something people say. Like, you know, when I didn’t get accepted to Berkely. That was life, “not going how I planned it.” Right? Wrong. Life not going how you planned it was ending up living in your grandmother’s house four months after she died because – because… “it was already set up for a wheelchair.” That was life not going how you planned it. Life not going how you planned it was being 24, in April, planning a graduation party, and applying to all the social work and humanitarian jobs on Indeed, Glassdoor, and any other website you could find… only to never graduate, never get a job as a social worker or a humanitarian, never… never WALK! That was life not going how you planned it. That’s where I was, in Grandma’s house, in running into everything and wondering how Grandma had made it seem so easy all those years after she had her feet amputated from diabetes. All alone. My sister had had to go back to work, and her kids. My parents thought it best I learned how to do for myself. My friends all had graduation parties, job interviews, or summer plans to get to. While I had nothing. Not a thing. A disabled early twenty-something victim of a drunk driver sitting in her grandmother’s house feeling sorry for herself. First, I cried. Then I shouted. I didn’t care if the neighbors heard me, I didn’t care if they didn’t. I just wanted to scream because it felt good. It was the only thing I could do just as well now as I could before the accident, and it felt good. So there.
By Sarah Lockwood5 years ago in Lifehack
