First lines given – #5

Welcome to First Lines Given! If that sentence confuses you, here’s a link to where I explain what this is.

Today’s first line is by Dea Jones! She said:

This one could go in many different directions. I decided to take an older approach to it though. Here’s the result:

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A cold Spam sandwich and a warm Pepsi beckoned me into the kitchen. Which said something about my eating habits. I wasn’t the only one who wondered why I was still so small.

But it wasn’t like I had much to choose from. It was the end of the week. I hadn’t gone grocery shopping yet. I was thinking about going tomorrow, but the weather lady with the awkward blue suit said that unless I go out before 5 a.m., rain would pour down on me. And there was no way anyone was going to get my butt up before 5 a.m. to go to a grocery store.

I would’ve gone tonight, but somehow I was already in my pajamas. Huh. Weird.

Anyways, I had forgotten to finish my food from earlier and went back to finish it. Did I mention that part? Whoops.

I couldn’t remember when I started eating this food. Days had become a blur. I didn’t have any clocks in the house. The TV stayed off; I didn’t care for those new drama shows anyways. I didn’t remember where I put my phone. I got distracted by… Oh, I couldn’t remember when anymore. I got distracted by something until I realized an hour or more had passed, and my food was cold.

I didn’t have much food left. I might have mentioned that before. I wasn’t going to make a new sandwich and waste this food, so I just picked it up again.

The cold Spam sandwich tasted more like cardboard than anything else. Or that could be the medicine talking. The doctors had been piling up so much medicine on me lately that my senses left my body, one by one.

I could taste a few foods now, and a Spam sandwich was not one of them. I hated Spam anyways, but I could get it down without the taste.

The soda wasn’t something I looked forward to either, but I still put the warm liquid down my throat. Warm soda always tasted like crap. But Pepsi was one of the last drinks strong enough that I could taste well. When I was younger, I drank a soda a day; Pepsi was one of my favorite choices. I usually saved Pepsi for special days now.

Today was a special day, wasn’t it? Why was it special? Because it was the day before the rain came in? Was it supposed to be a holiday? Oh, I had become great at forgetting holidays. Toward the night, my kids would call, asking why I hadn’t called them all day. They’d say something about their day and hang up the phone. I wouldn’t be able to remember anything to tell them what I did.

I tried to remember those special days though. Every year when I got a new calendar from my eldest, the days were already marked and circled for me to remember. The only problem was remembering to scratch the day off before I went to bed. Some days, I ended up scratching multiple days off.

My memory wasn’t always this bad, but I couldn’t tell when this all started.

Maybe it started right before I visited the doctor almost every week, checking up on my unnatural body fluid. Or when I started to rely on the names on the backs of photographs to tell me who was in the picture. Or it could be that when I was younger, I hit my head, and life became a blur after a while.

I did remember my newspaper every day though. I always solved those crossword and sudoku puzzles well.

But you know what? This Spam sandwich might have been a turkey sandwich all along.

Copyright © Robin LeeAnn