Short Story: The Bathtub

  Another week gone by, and it's time for another sneak peek. This is number six of eight. We're nearing the end of our short story collection, and we're getting very excited about it all. We're working on a cover design now as well as finishing up the final drafts of our stories. We'll most likely be sending it off to a professional writer/editor in the next week or two, and then we'll see about getting it professionally published. If that doesn't happen, you can all look for it on Amazon by end of November. We'll announce it when it happens, but for now, here's another peek at what we're working on. This passage is from a story my wife wrote called "The Bathtub":

  The siblings looked alike only in vague ways, they had the same color of dirty brown hair and brown eyes. But the shapes of their faces, though narrow, were different; it was hard to see the family resemblance. Only that there was something close about them. The girl was always looking out, trying to shield the boys, like a mother hen with large wings trying to cover all of her chicks. The boys followed her silently, looking lost.

  This is one of the darkest stories of the collection as it concerns suicide. The story follows three siblings who were heavily abused as children, and how they cannot get over the things their parents did to them. The themes are forgiveness, revenge, familial love and hate, and escape. If and when you read this story -- and all of the short stories in this collection -- don't just concentrate on the actions of the characters, or the rights and wrongs of the world they live in, but think about the pain, and the irony of what is going on. Life is not a beautiful thing for everyone after all.