One more penny. That was her mantra. Saide’s mother established it quite early on that a penny saved was a penny earned. It was easier to meet life’s bigger goals when broken into smaller chunks. Every time she found a penny on the street, she picked it up, placed it in her pocket, and on her return to her apartment, placed it in one of the porcelain jars her mother gave her before she left. She only used pennies, and carefully never spent a single one. Sadie purposely created change just so she could collect more pennies. Once the jar filled to the brim, Sadie went to the bank for the rolling papers. On her return, she then emptied her jar onto the table, neatly counting out the pennies one by one, sorting them into piles. Every once in a while, a shiny one caught her eye, and Sadie would be tempted to keep it. But the penny needed to be saved. The piles she took, rolled them up into her papers, until the numbers neatly lined up with the opening to reveal 50 cents. Once complete, she left the unfinished roll of pennies in her jar, drove the completed rolls back to the bank, and deposited them into her special savings account.

Today the bank teller gave her the account total, and Sadie beamed with pride: she met her goal. She withdrew the entire sum from her account. Happily she returned home to her mom sitting on the shelf, in the other porcelain jar. Grabbing the jar of ashes, she danced and said in a singsong voice “Tomorrow mom, you’re going home.”

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A few years ago l joined a startup writing group called ThinkingTen. The concept is simple: there’s a daily prompt and you have 10 minutes to write whatever comes to mind. l deleted my blog posts from the site when I received an email saying the founder was shutting down the site. I hadn’t written anything in a while anyway. It’s still going, but I’ve decided to repost my original works here for Fiction friday.

Prompt: words – penny, numbers, home

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