Fiction

I have my first fiction assignment due in a week: a 4-6 page short story, which doesn't sound hard until I started trying to pull a story line from pretty much anywhere I could reach.  "They" say write what you know, yet when what you know and what you write about is tangled up in a cultural adjustment, and when suddenly everyone else is also tangled up in it, I imagine those words and ideas become mighty cliched.  I'm trying to use true influences, since I simply cannot scrap my foundation to write something foreign on this first try.  This is my blind stab at a developing story.  Please leave feedback!  I would much rather read it here than to be bombarded with it in the classroom workshop!

           It was not the rotten sweetness of three-day old trash that startled her entrance or the thin cloud of fruit flies having descended on the scrapings of her morning dishes. It was neither of these things that left her breathless in the doorway, paralyzed and disgusted by the static nature of tasks undone. “Take out the garbage,” was in fact scratched low on her traveling list of must-dos, and the dishes, and the laundry -- her laundry, defrosting the freezer and sweeping the floors. It was, rather, coming home to her own voiceless echoes – the cold jingle of house keys on pink Formica countertops, the snap of cabinets opened and shut, the airy and almost inaudible buzz of warming television tubes, and her erratic breathing, proof that she may never grow accustomed to this kind of loneliness.