One Image One Minute Emily Brown

Blood on the pillow. White ruffles stained almost black. A morally and physically gray woman’s life in one image. Unbeknownst to the lawn boys who cut the phone lines, shattered her transom and hit her over the head so they could ransack her home, Cora Warner Perrins was cheap, but not rich. She stayed quiet during the whole ordeal and tried not to talk about it for years later. Despite her protests that she only wished they hadn’t thrown her TV into the river, that she would miss her late husband’s masonic sword, that she was really looking forward to that pound of chocolate she had received for mother’s day, we knew she just wanted her life back. The life those men almost spilled on the ruffled cotton, the life she almost lost, but also the life already behind her; The life that was so deteriorated that the only remaining things of import were a television, a defunct sword, and a pound of chocolate.