rivers_bend

I've been having trouble with my writing mojo recently and decided I should write a flash fic. The ever helpful tigertrapped gave me the prompt Another Country from this week's WriteWords Challenge.

For victorian_tweed who is after me to write my memoirs. When I was sixteen I went to Nicaragua for three weeks on a youth group trip.

Thank you to karaokegal and tigertrapped for very necessary beta.

general rated 315 words.


I've been home less than 24 hours and the fluorescent lights of the store hurt my eyes. There is at least a mile of breakfast cereal, every color, every flavor, every grain and chemical imaginable, ready to be tossed into your cart, taken home and poured into a bowl with milk fresh from the fridge. Teeny tiny chocolate chip cookies, Fruity Pebbles, Captain Crunch, breakfast with marshmallows. Five dollars a box.

Each one an assault on my senses. Something so commonplace has become a total shock after only three weeks away, where breakfast was an egg that came from a chicken and not a carton, and then only because I was a guest. Every day after that, breakfast was a tortilla with a smear of beans.

Three weeks in a country my government told me was violent, backwards and evil, where the most frightening thing I saw were the guards at our American Embassy, armed with machine guns and scowls. In a country where the dangerous rebels were teachers daring to increase the literacy rate.

The packages of meat, cut off the bone, skinless, wrapped in plastic on Styrofoam trays, are a far cry from the half a chicken, bones and all, that turned up on your plate at every restaurant, always cooked the same way. Options were limited: chicken or fish. No lamb chops, pork tenderloin, baby-back ribs. Just expensive protein served up for tourists, whose dollars, according to the rumors, went to buy guns. I saw no evidence of that.

'Welcome home,' my mother said, 'I just need to run to the store, pick up something for dinner. Anything you'd like.' And she meant it. Vegetables and fruit from every season and every part of the globe. Acres of choices, packaged and processed, served up to the happy consumer.

This is America. Land of the free. There's nothing you can't have here. Except your self-respect.