Cane: 5 Minute Freewrite

The chilly December air snapped against Melinda's face as she sat on the steps of the doctor's office where her mother worked. She was working a candy cane between her teeth, never crunching but carefully whittling the end into a sharp point. It wasn't one of the busier parts of the town center, but still, a handful of shoppers galumphed along the slushy sidewalk, knocking off errands between the ends of their shifts and the beginnings of their nightly homemaking rituals. She saw one couple, probably newlyweds, holding hands as they moved from the card shop to the bakery. Perhaps they were shopping for someone's birthday. She wondered what kind of cake they'd buy, if they liked the same kind. She wondered what it was like to hold someone's hand, and shivered as the wind tickled down the back of her neck.

Surely her mom would want her to come back inside. But she thought it better to catch cold than to catch whatever sickness was lingering in the waiting room, where people sniffled and oozed, and old men called her "sweetheart." Melinda hated being called sweetheart. She scraped her teeth along her peppermint shiv, imagining what it would be like to press its sugary point into the hand of the next person who tried.