Annie says men be nice to the women in your lives

 Annie says men be nice to the women in your lives

fiction 

edward pritchard

Annie Oakley says men be nice to the women in your lives. 

Born Phoebe, Annie suffered and fretted as a child and teenager. Many a morning living on the border of Ohio and Indiana in the 19th century she stood with Jupiter to her back and looked West to where cold red Mars drooped in the Western sky and dreamed of a life of freedom  as a pistolero. Still Annie never used her marksman skills to do evil like Wild Bill or Doc Holiday. 

Two hundred times Annie shot a cigar or cigarette out of her husbands mouth in the Buffalo Bill show and always remained a demur lady. Once it was rumored chief Sitting Bull bowed to the little lady out of respect. Men be kind to the Women in your lives.

I wonder if Phoebe cooked, cleaned and sewed.

 

What happened to Franny laying on the couch

 What happened to Franny laying on the couch

fiction

edward w pritchard

Sometimes I wonder what happened to Franny Glass laying there on the couch in the old sprawling 

Manhattan apartment, and what happen to the painters that same late morning, and did those painters 

 ever get 

their work done of sprucing  up the walls of the Manhattan apartment that Bessie and Les Glass rented

 so so long ago. Franny was a lovely girl. I remember she would mumble incessantly as she said the

 pilgrims prayer over and over laying on the couch with a heating pad and a small book clutched 

tightly 

into her prayer folded hands. Franny reminded me a bit of W. Glass her older brother, a twin who

died  years ago. W glass' eyes would tear up if someone said it looked like rain according to Bessie.