Flash Fiction Friday: The Girl without a Grandmother

You never know who’s sharing the bus with you.

For example, there’s me. I'm sitting across the aisle from you, with my glossy black pumps resting on the seat in front of me.

I am the Girl without a Grandmother.

It’s not that my parents were adopted, or that my grandmother died long before I was born. It’s that neither she, nor any of my grandparents, ever existed at all.

I’ve heard a few explanations for my parents’ provenance. In my favorite version, they were built, not born. The closest thing we have to genealogy is a team of people wearing lab coats, holding clipboards with stoic expressions and big ideas.

My parents were in the news their whole lives. Reporters buzzed around the hospital--or lab--where I was born. But now I’m grown. I sell life insurance here in the city. Nobody recognizes the Girl without a Grandmother now that she’s a woman.