Last Christmas

[This is a work of fiction.]

“Do you like these?”, she asked.

I nodded.

“Ask your mother to get one for you.”

I slunk away. How could I tell her that my mother was confined to a bed, dying of tuberculosis? That my father had abandoned us. That we survived only on the charity of the church. She had been fooled by my school uniform I wore- the school which I attended on scholarship.

For weeks I stayed away, but something drew me back.

She spotted me at once. “Pick one”, she said. “A gift from me to you.”

My mother’s last Christmas will be memorable.

_____

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