Pieces of Hope: A Collection

This Was Me

Note:  This flash fiction piece was written for the WCWRC-BOOKCLUB short story collection and published on their account as well.

Perhaps it was not the first time I'd done anything of that sort, but it seems to me that's when it all began.  

I was just seven years old.  A girl who hated dresses and loved cookies.  My favorite cookies were my mother's homemade peanut butter ones, which also had huge chunks of chocolate baked in them.  To this day, I know of no one else who do make them, much less as delicious as mother did.  

Because of the size of the cookies, and their inherent richness, mother would only allow me to have one at a time.  They seemed so small to me when I was so limited! 

One day, mother had just baked up a batch of these wonderful treats.  She'd given me one of them, piping hot enough to burn my mouth if I wasn't careful, and a glass of milk, then left to make a call.  I was left all alone at the kitchen table.

 I devoured the cookie as fast as I could without burning myself, only pausing to chew it down to size so I could swallow it.  All too soon, it was gone.  There was still a half glass of milk.  I looked up at the countertop, where the other cookies sat cooling.  

I looked down at my glass of milk again, and a little voice inside me began to reason... Not in human words, I didn't really think these thoughts.  But I did it in the back of my head, without words, so that I wouldn't have to face what I was considering.  Then I darted out of the chair, snatched another one of the cookies, and darted back.

I ate this cookie even more hastily than the first.  I gloried in it, much like I'm sure Eve enjoyed the forbidden fruit before she handed it to Adam.  Washing it down with milk, I put the cup in the sink and dashed out the door, sure I had escaped notice. 

It hadn't.  Mother's eye immediately caught the fact that one cookie was missing from the neat rows on the trays.  Since there'd been no one else in the house at the time, there was no point in lying to her.

But, much like Adam tried to hide from God after the Fall, I did my best. 

"Honey, a cookie is missing.  Do you know what happened to it?"

I kept as straight a face as I could, while adrenaline and a sugar rush was making my legs feel shaky.  "No."  

With the forbidden cookie roiling my stomach, she cornered me into admitting I'd eaten it.  After that, mother explained to me what I'd done wrong, and why it was wrong.  She told me I could have no more cookies for two weeks.  It felt like a death sentence, but I lived through it.  

But that was where it began.  The first time that voice had coaxed me into doing a wrong action like that.  And the thing is, when you listen to the voice once, it is that much easier to listen to it again, and again, and again...

As I grew up, it became an old friend.  I  took its advice all the time.  Of course, I thought I had a choice.  I thought I could turn it off or on like flicking a switch.  That I could have all I wanted and still listen to it.  Perhaps that is what Adam and Eve thought before the Fall. 

But as time went on, and I entered college, I realized that the voice was starting to do me some harm.  I wanted to party when it would be better to study.  

"No, not tonight," I said into my phone.  "I've got to study for that test coming up next week.  Can't afford a bad grade on this one."