(Today's prompts: silk scarf, black and tan, profound)The Silk Scarf
She touched the silk scarf. It was tan colored with black flowers. Her mother gave it to her today. She said “your old enough now, I want you to have this.” Rachel didn’t understand. It was just an old scarf. It might have once been pretty, but now it just looked old. It was threadbare and worn in places, and there were a few little holes. Some of the stitches on the hem had come undone. The threads were hanging.
Rachel held it in her hands, but she didn’t understand. “Why are you giving me this?” she had asked her mother. Couldn’t you have given me something new?” Her mother looked at her with an exasperated, tired face.
“Maybe this was a mistake” her mother said. But then the phone rang and she left the room. Rachel was left standing there with the old thing in her hands. It just never worked. No matter what ever she said or did, it always was wrong. Rachel held the scarf up to look. It must have been pretty when it was new. She put it around her shoulders. She tried to ignore the not so faint odor of the mothballs that it must have been kept in for a long, long time. She went over to the mirror. She took off her pony tail holder and she let her long shiny hair fall across the black flowers that were all over the scarf. She looked in the mirror. She took a deep breath. She turned from side to side. She kept looking in the mirror. It was somebody else looking back at her.
Her mother came back to her room. Rachel quickly pulled the scarf off and started to fold it up. But her mother took it from her. “I don’t know if you can understand. You probably can’t.”
Rachel wanted to say something profound. She always wanted to, but she never did. “Maybe I will understand” was all she was able to say.
Her mother held out the scarf. “It was your grandmother’s scarf. She got it from her mother for her sixteenth birthday. She used to say it was the only present she ever got in the old country.” Her mother hugged the scarf to herself. “It was all she had when they had to leave, the scarf and the dress she was wearing that day. You know she was the only one who ever made it here. She managed to keep this scarf.”
The phone rang again. Her mother put the scarf on the bed and hurried away. Rachel picked it up and carefully put around herself again. She went back to the mirror. She turned from side to side. This time she was not startled when she looked at the mirror. The face she saw was not her own. The face she saw was that of another sixteen year old girl looking back at her.
