Inspiration can hit a writer at the strangest times and places. This story was one of them.

A friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed for the sake of privacy) sent me a link to a photograph she took on Flickr. This is what I saw:

Click to embiggen

The text on it is difficult to read, so I’ll paste it in here:

TO MY PRETTY BETTY
Always in my heart you’ll live
As long as life remains
Born Worchester, Mass.
Feb. 22, 1926
Died New Orleans, La.
Nov. 11, 1931

My friend is part of a group that photographs headstones, grave markers, and mausoleums and associates them with graves for sites such as Find A Grave. I don’t see this as something dark and sinister or psychologically unbalanced. These people I think provide a valuable service to society, for free, to help people find their loved ones and let the dead not be forgotten.

Anyway, back to the story. This link was sent to me in the early afternoon, and by late that night I realized that I couldn’t stop looking at it. There was something about it that set me to asking questions, ones that inevitably lead to a story.

I had to write a story about it to answer the questions that were running around in circles in my head:

• Why did they move from Massachusetts to New Orleans? What caused them to move?
• Why did the girl die at such a young age?
• Who was the person that wrote the inscription? What were they like?
• What were the circumstances surrounding the little girl’s death?

Within ten minutes I had the seed of the story formed in my head, and I set about writing, scrubbing, and writing some more. And now you get to see it for yourself.