Filament
Filament
Excerpt:
When she was seventeen, Loretta discovered that she was pregnant with Blue Simpson’s child, a shame really. Not because Tildon turned out to be a bad son. (In fact, he would do quite well, thirty-two years later, buying and operating a chain of successful southern fried chicken franchises.) It’s just that Loretta’s future seemed genuinely promising before this turn of events. She’d graduated high school as the valedictorian when she was sixteen. Granted, this was in Honey Grove, Texas, so there were not that many students, certainly not that many bright ones, but she had nonetheless impressed her teachers enough to skip a couple of grades, and then went off to college in Denton on a full scholarship to study journalism. In Denton, she met Blue, a strawberry-headed pipe fitter and apprentice welder from Bug Tussle who liked to two-step. At the beginning of her sophomore year, he took her dancing every night for three straight weeks. By the end of that time, Tildon was conceived. Blue and Loretta hastily married during a freakish October snowstorm, and she gave up her academic pursuits and, until after Blue’s death, her dream of becoming a reporter. (One Story)