G’ Sunday!
Hope all’s tremendous! Still cranking out practice chapters and snippets. Below, you’ll find a snippet about Trudi, a girl who was only just adopted. To be honest, I’d started this practice chapter one night just before bed and was too tired to complete it (and thus it became a snippet). By the way, just a heads-up: I’m still working on picking up partial chapters I hadn’t completed in one sitting. Picking a chapter back-up doesn’t seem as though it should be challenging, but somehow, I find it to be. Nonetheless, please enjoy, and many thanks!
Trudi hauled a cardboard box into a kitchen and sat it beside a cardboard-box mountain. Suddenly, behind her, footsteps thumped down a staircase and reached a bottom, and a woman gasped.
“Trudi,” the woman said. “Did I not ask you to unload dining room boxes?”
Trudi wheeled. “The dining room boxes are stacked in the dining room.”
The woman’s eyebrows elevated. She marched through a doorway and, a moment later, ambled back into the kitchen and gazed at the cardboard-box mountain. “You’re going to ruin your back.”
Trudi shook her head. “I shouldn’t…so long as I lift with my knees. At least that’s what Mr. Chambers said.”
“Mr. Chambers?”
“Yep—at the orphanage, he was our handyman. But two autumns ago, he died.”
“Died?”
Trudi nodded. “He’d finished pulling garden weeds and then had started raking leaves. But later, when I’d peered through a window into our backyard, I’d seen him lying beside the rake and had ran for an adult.”
The woman crept to Trudi, kneeled, and touched her shoulders. “You mean, you were the one who’d found him?”
“Well, a group of crows had found him, I only heard their squawking.”
The woman sighed. “Trudi, listen: You no longer live in an orphanage. That’s because you’re no longer an orphan. You have a mom now, and she’s going to do everything she can to give you a start you deserve. So, you no longer need to look back to those days for anything. Everything you need is here, in the present, and if it isn’t, let me know, and I promise, I’ll get it for you. Okay?”
“Okay…”
“‘Okay, mom’?” the woman said and smiled.
Trudi smiled, as well. “Okay, mom.”