A Potent Memory
by William Snyder
© 2015 William Snyder
East Valley High School - 1993
A fifteen year-old mother stands with a group of students waiting for classes to begin. Her blonde hair is long and straight and it needs to be washed. She wears a tight white tank top and Levi's cut-offs. She is not wearing a bra and her little gut hangs out between the tank-top and shorts. The girl smokes and so do her friends. No one laughs or talks. They just smoke their cigarettes as if there is nothing else. There are cigarette butts everywhere. There must be a million cigarette butts spread across the massive high school campus that had once been an air force base. The child, perhaps a year old, sits alone in the dirt, wearing a dirty pink t-shirt and a diaper. Snot bubbles and runs from her pudgy little nose. No one notices as this discarded child of a discarded child as she pushes the dirt along with her bare toes and fidgets bleakly with a yellow cigarette butt.
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