Mini-Series Stories | JBE Mindful Pathways
7:12 a.m. — Kitchen
The table is a map of unfinished business: cereal bowl welded to the wood by a halo of milk, yesterday’s mail fanned like playing cards, a glittering field of crumbs that survived last night’s wipe-down. Her mother says, “Clean the table,” with a mug balanced in one hand and her work bag in the other, already walking away.
The kid stands there, fourteen and jittering, the soft thud-thud of her heel against cabinet wood keeping time with a clock that seems to chew the minutes. She touches the mail first—moves it onto the chair. The bowl goes near the sink (not in, not yet). The crumbs? They look like static. Her brain invents categories she can’t hold onto: keep, toss, later, school, not now, definitely not now. The words float away like bubbles before she can catch them.
Her knee bounces harder. The seam in her sock saws at her skin. The fridge hum climbs and flattens into a single note. “Clean the table,” her mother said, and this—this is what she’s doing, right? Moving the pieces so the surface shows up again.
Her mother comes back for her keys, takes in the scene: cups on the stove, mail on the chair, crumbs sparkling like confetti that forgot about the party. The kid opens her mouth to say she’s working on it, but the hallway coughs up the bus schedule in her head and the word working falls apart. The clock swallows another minute.
“Shoes,” her mother says, trying for neutral and landing closer to hurry. “We’re late.”
They leave the table almost-clean, which is the same as not-clean in a world that runs on halves turning into zeros.
9:40 a.m. — Hallway
The first period lasts forty-seven minutes. Her attention, today, comes in bursts—a good twelve, then a stretch of static she tries to ride like a wave without wiping out. Fluorescents buzz like a hive. Somebody’s gel pen clicks and unclicks, a metronome with bad manners. The clock keeps chewing.
Her backpack is a small planet with its own weather system. Paper-drifts slide when she unzips it for a pencil; a worksheet avalanches to the floor. She crouches to collect it and hears the teacher’s voice from far away: “Eyes up front.”
She is up front. Or trying to be. The room is too many radio stations at once. The kid next to her whispers, “You coming to lunch?” The AC kicks on with a rumble. A truck brakes outside, squeal echoing, and the sound skates across her nerves like a blade. Her neck prickles where a tag won’t lie flat against her shirt. The teacher’s earrings swing when she writes, and she can’t not notice the tiny glints of light.
“Focus,” the teacher says, sharper, and it lands like a slap even though it isn’t one. The kid’s cheeks go hot. She is focusing—on algebra, on the squeal, on the earrings, on the way her pencil feels too heavy and too light at the same time. She squeezes the pencil until the wood prints into her fingers. It helps for maybe three seconds. Then the squeal returns as a memory of a squeal, and the memory is loud enough to be real.
By the time the bell rings, she’s exhausted from sitting still.
3:15 p.m. — Home
Her mother steps inside with emails stuck to her face, the day’s small fires still smoking in her head. The table greets her like a dare. She can hear her own mother’s voice—We clean up, then we sit down—rattling in the bones. “Hey,” she calls, trying for soft. “The table.”
The kid is sprawled on the carpet, half inside a hoodie, one sock peeled halfway off. “I did,” she says, not looking up.
Cups on the stove. Mail on the chair. Crumbs still glittering like a refusal.
“Come on,” her mother says, and that’s the thin ice—just two words, but it’s how they crack. The kid’s shoulders rise to her ears. “I’m not fighting,” she says, which is what people say right before voices tilt upward. “I did it.”
“You moved it,” her mother says. She hears herself, hears the courtroom voice sliding in where the mother voice should be. “That’s not the same.”
“It is,” the kid fires back, fast and hot. “You said clean the table. You didn’t say throw things out. You didn’t say wipe. You just said—” Her hands fly, trying to pull the exact sentence out of the air. “You said words that don’t mean steps.”
There it is: a truth flashing through the heat, quick as lightning. It should land like relief. Instead, it lands on the clump of her mother’s own day—hungry, rushed, ragged—and the spark lights it. “I shouldn’t have to spell it out,” she says, instantly wishing she hadn’t said it.
Silence: a door nearly slams but doesn’t. Footsteps on carpet that doesn’t cushion this kind of leaving. Two nervous systems, both startled, both braced, turning away to keep from saying the next sharp thing.
The house holds the echo. The crumbs keep glittering.
4:02 p.m. — Micro-win
Her mother stands at the sink, hands deep in leftover dishwater turned the color of tea, and counts slowly. On the fourth breath she realizes what she can control is not this whole day, but the next ten minutes.
She gets a timer—old, loud, honest—and sets it on the counter. “Ten,” she calls into the living room. “Just ten. I’ll do towels. You do table. I’ll say steps. You say ‘next’ when you’re stuck.”
Silence. Then shuffling. The kid appears, hoodie up like armor, eyes screened but present. She perches on the edge of a chair like she might bolt and chooses not to.
Her mother keeps it stupid-simple, like she wishes someone had done for her. “Step one: put all cups in the sink. Any you find.”
“Next.”
“Step two: toss the flyers and empty envelopes. Keep the letter with a name.”
“Next.”
“Step three: stack the keep mail on the counter by the fruit bowl.”
“Next.”
“Step four: sweep crumbs into your hand, then into the trash. Not the floor.”
Her kid snorts—just a ghost of a laugh—and does it.
“Step five: wipe. Front to back.”
“Front to back?”
“Yeah. It’s how your grandmother did it,” she says, and instantly sees the memory: her own mother’s hand, smooth and sure, a clean line drawn across a day.
The timer ticks. It doesn’t judge. It just marks. Ten minutes is both too short to make anyone drown and long enough to make a dent.
Cups clink. Paper rustles. A cloth skims wood. The table—stubborn, ordinary, the most unmagical thing in the house—shows up as itself again. The kid exhales without realizing. Her shoulders drop half an inch. The feeling is small and huge at once.
Her mother wants to clap. She doesn’t. She keeps the air light. “Looks like a table,” she says, and means thank you. Then, because she has to say it while it’s in her mouth: “Clear steps = success. That’s on me.”
The kid nods like she’s been seen in a way that doesn’t sting. “Say the steps next time,” she says, not as a demand but as a map. “Like… exactly. And not all at once.”
“Deal,” her mother says. “And you tell me when your brain is sprinting so I stop talking like a podcast on 2x.”
Another ghost-laugh. The timer chirps and does not ask for a thesis.
10:11 p.m. — Quiet truth
Rain needles the bus stop outside, steady and thin. In her room the kid tries to journal like they told her at school, but the pages feel like paperwork. She writes one line and lets it be enough: Today I did the table.
She adds a dot like a period, then turns it into a star. It’s dumb. It’s perfect. She shuts the notebook and puts it where she can see it from bed.
Down the hall, her mother writes on a sticky note for herself and for whoever finds it first: Say exactly what you mean in the smallest steps possible. She sticks it on the fridge above the fruit bowl. It looks like a reminder; it feels like a truce.
The house quiets the way houses do when everyone decides not to push. The table stays a table. The towels get folded in a stack with one corner crooked, and nobody fixes it. Somewhere, a phone buzzes and is ignored on purpose. Somewhere else, a teacher types an email about missing work and doesn’t send it yet.
Tomorrow isn’t fixed. The lights at school will still buzz. The sock seams will still try to pick fights. The clock will still chew. But now there’s the memory of ten minutes that went right, and a sentence on paper, and a sticky note that turns instructions into something that doesn’t feel like a trap.
Her mother pauses in the doorway, not to audit but to witness. “Good night, kid,” she says.
“Night,” the kid answers from inside her hoodie cocoon, voice muffled, not annoyed. She is tired the way you get when you’ve been sprinting in place all day. She is also—just a little—steady.
Rain taps the window like a timer counting down to sleep. The house holds.
🖊️ Mini-Series Stories | JBE Mindful Pathways
Where the last word is never the end.
“Intrigued by this true fiction journey? Discover more powerful narratives in the Mini-Series Stories collection—where lived experiences unfold through storytelling with soul.”
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