writing: this week's assignment

* UPDATE: I only wrote the start of the story and only had 350 words to do it in!

This week in my fiction writing class we had to write a story about a man and a woman who have an affair resulting in a pregnancy...here was my piece:

The phone rang just as she picked up the mail by the front door. Her children last used the portable phone so she ran around the living room looking for it. The call came from the hospital; her husband had been in a horrible car accident. While she listened she absently mindedly put the mail down on the fireplace mantel. There this pile of mail would sit for the next six months, through nights of crying, through false hopes, and through the eventual post-funeral gathering at the house after her husband eventually succumbed to the injuries sustained in that car accident.

He had been texting someone when he over corrected and drove off the bridge, just before the guard railing started.

She finally noticed the mail as her daughter helped pack up the house for the sale. Her daughter handed her the mail, after riffling through it herself. Finally her head was clear again; she knew where she was going in her life. She and the children would make it through this tragedy.

The letter struck her as strange when she saw it. The handwriting scrawled on a cheap envelope addressed to Mrs. Dutton. It was rare to see her married name on envelopes. Everyone knew she had kept her own name because of her medical practice. It seemed the easiest thing to do at the time.

The letter came from his mistress. The mistress was tired of playing second fiddle, and explained in the letter that she and Cal (not Calvin, who was this man?) met in an elevator in Chicago more than three years ago. Their son would be born on what was now tomorrow, May 23rd.

Everything clicked into place. The late nights at work, the learning how to send a text message like her children even though he hated technology, the midnight calls to the house, and the woman at the funeral who said she was an employee of Calvin.