Balance

/ Liz H-H

The challenge? Write a story in exactly 6 sentences based on Denise’s one word prompt: BALANCE. Visit, comment, and write & post your own on Six Sentence Stories 

Late night, long day, one after the other, until I’m sure I’m going to drop from lack of the basics to keep this aging body going; I’d grazed my way through too sweet and too salty snacks at the various exhibits, and gotten the bargain basement liquid refreshments that were typical to these professional conferences and their bleary evening parties, but what served me in my twenties is unsustainable for a woman in her sixties.

I’d made it through, made connections like a spider on acid, sold several books and bought a few (like a busker salts his cap), enlisted the interest of three – count ‘em three – publishers who were the right niche for the new series by my latest client, but now I’m back home, cleaning up the cat’s indignant piles of vomit in the middle of my quilt, deposited in several key areas and no doubt soaked through the protective pad to the mattress.

Yes, I’m sleeping on the couch tonight because no spare sheets.

And now I’m leaning into the cool of the open refrigerator door, looking for signs of food that won’t sit up, wave a saucy good-bye to me, and slither under said couch, fleeing the terrifying rumble of my hungry belly and gut enflamed from too many days and nights of conference fare. Just a few more years of running this hard for my employer before retiring myself from the people-pleasing hustle, and moving on to something that supports living in balance; something that will sustain, rather than drain my final decades.

Thank God I’m an agent, rather than an actual author.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2023)

(Note: this is absolutely of a work of fiction, though I do have a cat that vomits more than he should, in places that he shouldn’t)

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