Simply 6 minutes.
Simply 6 Minutes – Welcome to the Challenge: 09/08/2026
One More Dance
“Grandma, you’re supposed to be in bed!”
Eighty-seven-year-old Rose looked down at her great-grandson and frowned.
“So are you.”
“I’m two.”
“Exactly. Far too young for weddings.”
He giggled and grabbed her hand.
Rose had escaped from her hotel room twenty minutes earlier.
Her daughter had insisted she was tired.
Her granddaughter had insisted she needed rest.
The bride—her youngest granddaughter—had kissed her goodnight and thanked her for staying through dinner.
Everyone had apparently forgotten one important detail.
Rose loved to dance.
So when the music travelled upstairs through the floorboards, she put on her slippers, tied her dressing gown firmly around her waist and followed it.
The room fell silent when she appeared.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rose complained. “You’d think you’d never seen a woman in a dressing gown before.”
Then the smallest gentleman in the room approached.
Her great-grandson, Oliver, wearing a tiny black suit and bow tie.
He held out his hand.
“Dance, Nana?”
Rose looked around at her family.
Her daughter was already crying.
“Oh, stop that,” Rose said. “You’ll ruin your mascara.”
Someone restarted the music.
Oliver bounced.
Rose shuffled.
Neither had the slightest concern for rhythm.
Everyone applauded anyway.
Halfway through, Rose looked down at him and remembered another little boy holding her hands nearly sixty years earlier.
Oliver’s grandfather.
For one fleeting moment, time folded in on itself.
Children became parents.
Parents became grandparents.
And grandmothers became old women who were apparently supposed to go to bed before the dancing started.
Rose smiled.
Not tonight.
She squeezed Oliver’s tiny hands.
“One more?”
“One more!”
And they danced again.
Because someday he might not remember her dressing gown.
He might not remember the song.
But Rose hoped, somewhere deep inside him, he would remember being loved.
Word count: 322
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
My new song is out .
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
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