WeWriWa—Served a proper feast

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Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

This year’s Thanksgiving excerpts come from Chapter 4, “Thanksgiving 1959,” of Little Ragdoll. Set from 1959–74, it takes protagonist Adicia Troy from age five to twenty. Here, Adicia and her four closest sisters have gone to dinner at the Bowery Mission with their surrogate mother Sarah, a live-in nanny and maid whom their black-hearted blood mother barely pays.

The scents of delicious food are overwhelming when they enter the dining hall. Adicia eagerly rushes over to a table with five available chairs and place settings, making sure it’s near the end of the table so they have space for Justine’s stroller.

“Do you mind that you never eat kosher meat, Sarah?” Emeline asks as they’re being served.

“You eat what you can when you don’t have money. Besides, I wasn’t from a religious family. Most German Jews weren’t religious. My family wasn’t anti-religious, but we weren’t Orthodox either.”

“Judaism has different denominations like Christianity? I haven’t read many books on world religions. I don’t even know what denomination my family’s supposed to be, just that we were baptized some type of Protestant.”

The ten lines end here. A few more follow.

“I don’t know either,” Lucine says. “Why did our parents bother having us baptized if we only go to church on major holidays?”

“There are four major branches of Judaism,” Sarah says. “Then there are many different communities in the Orthodox world, and small branches like Karaites. We can look for a good book about it next time we go to the library.”

Adicia practically inhales the feast set before her. Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, yams, vegetables, pumpkin, pecan, and apple pie, applesauce, and piping-hot rolls. The volunteers and mission workers are very special for buying, preparing, and serving all this food to so many people, and then cleaning up it all up.