An acorn for you. Feel free to put it in the zine if you would like.
I was the first pandemic hire in the office.
When we started going back for in-person work, I wasn’t the ‘new girl’ anymore, but it felt like it, surrounded by people who were all happy to see each other.
After a few days, one of the office veterans passed by me in the kitchen. “Hey,” he said, stopping and smiling. “I like your cardigan.” I was wearing a comfortable drapey cardigan with bold stripes from the warm side of the color wheel. “I’ve noticed you’ve been wearing some neat ones. We should start a club.” He gestured to his own cardigan, blue like blue raspberry lemonade koolaid with silvery white stars. “We could be called The Cardigang. We’d be the coziest, least intimidating gang ever.”
We always stopped to say hi and compliment each other’s cardigans after that.
One Friday afternoon, he went home early with a headache, apologizing for having to miss a training session I was running. The following Monday, his brother called to let us know that he’d never woken up Saturday morning. No one ever found out what happened.
It rained the day of the funeral. There was a crowd of people in black standing in the rain with black umbrellas like I’d only ever seen in movies.
I wore a blue cardigan with stars on it.
oh my goodness, this one hits, and you knew it would! Well done with the storytelling, and well done with the craft.
It leaves me thinking about how many people might miss me, more than I realistically expect them to, if I died, for things like "dresses interestingly" and "says bizarre and hopefully charming things to coworkers." I would like to think that my funeral would be fairly well-attended. I would like to think that there would be a lot of small stories about me contained in other people.
a lot conveyed in a few words; thank you for sharing your story, and your memory.
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Acorn story submissions are CLOSED! thank you so much for sharing your stories, they are of fabulous quality, and I'm so impressed by the creative outpouring and beautiful themes that are emerging like a woven tapestry. thanks for your patience and look out for the zine.
