Aiden lives with his grandmother, Nanna, while his mother is in a psychiatric hospital. Nanna is broke. Over one long day she tells her friends that Aiden has leukemia, sends him upstairs to take a friend’s jewelry, collects a check for his “medical expenses,” and leaves a healing service with a gold chalice in her handbag, hoping it might cure her daughter. The story begins in her bathroom that morning.
My grandmother sat on the toilet seat and brushed my curly brown hair until my scalp hurt. I was on the floor just in front of her.
“You got your grandfather’s hair. Stand up and look at yourself in the mirror. Much better, don’t you think?”
I touched my scalp. “It hurts.”
“You gotta toughen up, Aiden. Weak people get nowhere in this world. Your grandfather was weak. Addicted to the bottle. Your mother has an impaired mind. Now she’s in a nuthouse.” She bent down and stared into my face. Her hazel eyes seemed enormous. I smelled coffee on her breath. There were blackheads on her nose. “And your father, he couldn’t handle the responsibility of a child. People gotta be strong. Do you understand me?” She pinched my cheeks.
I reflexively pushed her hands away.
“Life is full of pain, sweetheart. And I don’t mean just the physical kind.” She took a cigarette from her case on the back of the toilet, lit it, and inhaled. “You’ll be hurt a lot, but you got to carry on. You know what the British people used to say when the Germans bombed London during World War II?”
“No.”
“Keep calm and carry on.” She hit my backside. “Run along and put some clothes on.” I was wearing just my underwear and t-shirt. “We have a busy day.”
I dressed in the blue jeans and a yellow short-sleeve shirt she had bought me. She stood in front of the mirror by the front door of the living room, holding a picture of my mother. She kissed the glass and placed it on the end table next to the couch. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and arranged her pearl necklace, put on bright red lipstick, and fingered her gray hair, trying to hide a thinning spot at the top of her forehead. She turned and smoothed her green cotton dress, glancing at herself from behind. “Not bad for an old broad.” She looked me over. “Come here.” She tucked my shirt in, licked her hand, and smoothed my hair. “You’d think I never brushed it.”
Just as she opened the front door, she said, “Hold on,” and walked to the kitchen counter, where she put her hand in a glass jar full of bills. She took out what must have been at least thirty dollars.
“Give this money to the kiddos next door.”
When we were outside, she pushed me towards their house. On the front lawn of the broken-down house, empty axles of an old bicycle poked out of the weedy grass. They were playing on the swing set. The young pale girl with stringy hair looked at me suspiciously as I approached the fence. She walked toward me. Her brother stood behind her, arms folded. He had a mean look on his face and spit.
“This is for you.” I shoved the money through the chain links. The girl reached out, but most of the bills fell onto the dirt.
“Thank you,” she said.
As I walked away, her brother yelled, “We don’t need no charity from you.”
From The Weight of Small Mercies.
The first sentence puts two people in a room and gives them something to do: a grandmother brushes a boy’s hair “until my scalp hurt.” Care and hurt arrive together, and that pairing is the story. Within a page Nanna has stated her creed, given the story its title and handed the boy money for the children next door, so the reader already knows something of her toughness, her generosity and her need to be seen as generous. Whether the page does all that well is for a reader to judge; it is offered here as one attempt to begin in the middle of things.
A suggestion. If your story opens with background, you might try starting instead at the first moment when two characters are doing something together, and see how much of the background the scene can carry.