My mother never cursed. Not a single swear word. In fifth grade, I heard a kid got detention for saying the taboo F word. “Mom, what is the F word?” I asked her.
“I’m sure you’ve heard it,” she dismissed.
“No. I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, I don’t want you to say it, so I won’t tell you.”
Being the insistent eleven-year-old that I was, I rationalized, “But what if I accidentally say it and don’t realize it’s a bad word?”
I was so clever. All my mother would tell me was that it rhymed with “luck,” but I was smart enough to put an F in front of it. I promised to be good and never say “fluck.”
My mother never cursed until my sophomore year of high school. The first time it slipped out — she was so angry at Dad — we just stared at each other. She said she was sorry. “Why?” I asked. “I’ve heard much worse at school.”
And that was true. Boys called girls awful words, and girls called girls even worse names. It was just startling to hear a word (which I didn’t even think was all that bad) with such foul connotation escape from Mom’s mouth.
My mother never cursed before the divorce. I did, but never around her. Only in the company of the friends I wanted to impress did I acquire a sailor’s tongue with a careless attitude that would have made Mom shake her head in disappointment. In each other’s company, she and I maintained civility. It was an unspoken rule.
Now my mother does curse. She seems a little more free now that she isn’t censored. I curse, too, but only at appropriate times, like a lifelong habit still holds my tongue except in the most extreme circumstances where I just have to say . . . well, you know.
*** All works are fiction. The events, characters, and narrator(s) in flash fiction pieces are not intended to accurately portray any real persons, living or dead. ***
I'm an award-winning fantasy author, artist, and photographer from La Porte, Indiana. My poetry, short fiction, and memoir works have been featured in various anthologies and journals since 2005, and several of my poems are available in the Indiana Poetry Archives. The first three novels in my Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms series have received awards from Literary Titan.
After some time working as a freelance writer, I was shocked by how many website articles are actually written by paid "ghost writers" but published under the byline of a different author. It was a jolt seeing my articles presented as if they were written by a high-profile CEO or an industry expert with decades of experience. I'll be honest; it felt slimy and dishonest. I had none of the credentials readers assumed the author of the article actually had. Ghost writing is a perfectly legal, astonishingly common practice, and now, AI has entered the playing field to further muddy the waters. It's hard to trust who (or what) actually wrote the content you'll read online these days.
That's not the case here at On The Cobblestone Road. I do not and never will pay a ghost writer, then slap my name on their work as if I'd written it. This website is 100% authentic. No outsourcing. No ghost writing. No AI-generated content. It's just me... as it should be.
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