(This is a short story based on real life.)
It's almost 6:am in the morning and the family of 10 is already wide awake. They're hungry as they haven't had enough in their previous meal. The eldest son took his faded-due-too-much-usage denim jacket. He stretched his arms upward and suddenly made his neck sort of snap to condition it to what he's about to do.
He heard there's a rice grain hauling today on the other side of the hill. He didn't participated in the harvest yesterday but he can join to haul.
He left the house as his wife acknowledged he's going to leave. He's young but he's in love and since he can't provide a home, they lived with his parents.
There's no more food and it's been raining a lot and so even the fruits they could have were all spoiled in the rain.
The old man went to the kitchen. There's no rice to cook, there's no root crops to boil, no chicken eggs and even leafy vegetables are beyond edible condition.
They're ruined.
The old man looked for a lighter. His granddaughter is watching him puzzled.
"What he's going to prepare?", she keeps asking in her mind.
She can't asked directly since he's grumpy since he is so hungry.
He saw a match and he lighted it up. He barely made it lit as it is slightly wet due to rainwater coming from the roof hole.
He took some dried woods from the shed. His daughter-in-law gathered it yesterday before the rain came.
He just kept burning the woods without cooking anything. He intentionally make it smoke some more.
The curious granddaughter didn't stop herself.
"Grandpa, why are you doing that? Mom had a hard time gathering that yesterday and we won't have anything to use for later when Dad arrive with rice."
"You're so young. Don't you understand people will think we don't have food since they didn't noticed the smoke from our house."
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Hello there everyone! I'm so grateful for the unmerited upvote you bestowed in my intro blog. Hope you like this story of mine. It's real incident related to my family and of course, I'm the granddaughter. You can see the date in the picture and I literally captured it since I thought of this story to share.
Hope you had enjoyed it.
I took a selfie with my pet cat Rodrigo. Say Hi.
All photos are mine.☺️