May 12 – Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Today’s prompt for Story a Day’s May challenge is to fictionalise an almost unbelievable true story. You can read the full prompt here. I have previously written a short story that fits this prompt on my blog, entitled Room 33. Therefore, today I’ll be following this prompt very loosely.

Yes, it is correct that truth can *sometimes* be stranger than fiction, but I have always found fiction a far more enjoyable read. Combined with the fact that I feel I have already written enough based on real life/memories this May, I will be taking another memory (I am rapidly running out of these) and creating a work of pure fiction from it.

Some of the elements in this story are, of course, true. For instance, I do have relatives and some dresses are in fact blue.

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When Great Grandma died, Nana cried for days. Great Grandma had mothered six children, but as she had become older it had been Nana who had looked after her the most. She had lived with Nana and Grandpa in their little house in the city, despite how much she claimed she hated the dirty air. She would sit in the armchair and dangle her white slippers down over the front, where her toes could just reach the floor.

Her dress had been baby blue. It had reached her knees and it had been one of those long, unshapely dresses that looked like it had originally been designed to be a nightgown. There had been white lace around the bottom, the collar and the sleeves. The grandchildren had believed that Great Grandma’s wardrobe was full of baby blue dresses: she never wore anything else.

When Great Grandma died, Nana cried for days. A week after her death, and the feeling in the house changed dramatically: Nana stopped crying and everything became strangely ordinary. Great Grandma was no longer there, but things carried on as normal. The world turned without her quiet mutters about the poor choice of music on the radio and how big televisions were getting these days.

The funeral came and went. The grandchildren could not understand what had happened: they knew that Great Grandma was gone and that she would not be returning, but they were not old enough to understand what that meant. Grandpa, a religious man, bought an ornamental plate depicting Jesus Christ to perch on the mantelpiece and told the children about Heaven. They were noticeably uninterested in the subject.

Then, about a month after Great Grandma’s death, the grandchildren started to notice Nana looked at Great Grandma’s chair as though the woman was still there.

‘Grandma is watching over us,’ Nana would say, whenever the children asked her what she was doing.

Mother got very upset with Nana after that. ‘Stop talking about her as though she’s still here,’ she would say to Nana. ‘They need to understand that she’s gone. They need to understand that she’s dead and that they’re not going to see her again.’

But Nana continued to say that Great Grandma was there, sitting in her armchair just like she always had been. And when the grandchildren stayed over at Nana’s house, they would sneak down the stairs when everyone else was in bed to see Nana sitting in the living room, facing the armchair.

Sometimes, if they concentrated hard, they thought that they could see a pair of white slippers dangling down over the front of the seat.