It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women.  I mind my mommy lived to be seventy and more.  Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night gown she had had for forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. “You all will look out for pa the best you can,” she said. “I am tired.”

From “As I Lay Dying,” by William Faulkner

This literary snippet is not only a compelling summary of a woman’s hard life in a few sentences but also a masterpiece of how to imitate ethnic speech, which is something extremely difficult to do.  Some readers might think that this kind of scene does not happen in real life, but it does. In one of the real short short stories I wrote—which I haven’t published yet—something similar occurred. This is a brief summary:

I had known this woman for twenty-two years.  She was blonde, had blue eyes, and spoke with a sweet voice. She and her husband were from Canary Islands, Spain, and in their late teens had left this country for Cuba, where they never made enough money to return to their homeland, not even for their parents’ funerals.   When Fidel Castro came into power, they lost everything they had and emigrated to the US.  They worked hard and were enjoying their best years until Hurricane Hugo came and destroyed their home. During the reconstruction, her husband died of a heart attack.  From then on she merely existed to take care of her grownup grandson and one of her daughters who lived with her.  A month after I had spoken with her, I got a call from her daughter.

“My mother died,” she said.

She explained how her mother had been sick with some discomfort in the stomach that had not seemed severe.  The night she died, she woke up at 4:00 AM and called her daughter and her grandson,

“Help me to sit down on the sofa.’

She sat. Then she said,

“Put some lipstick on my lips. I don’t want to look ugly.”

Once her daughter had reddened her lips, the mother said,

“Make me some Cuban coffee … to settle my stomach.”

She drank her coffee.

“Sit down next to me,” she told her daughter. “Give me your hand.”

The daughter held her hand.

“I don’t think I will live to see the daylight.”

Little by little, she fell asleep and stopped breathing.