I would like to say storytelling, but it’s a talent I’m still trying to hone.
This calls for a writing sample. I wrote this as a copywriting exercise in the agency I used to work for. The challenge was to write a story based on this news article. I was also given this (rather disturbing) tribute as a peg. Isn’t it amazing how you can look as if you know someone just by tracking them online?
The instructions were: write about the incident, and it has to mention that the victim’s eyes were donated to the blood bank.
Part of the 30 Day Writing Meme. Next is Day 20: A Hobby of Yours.
Short Story: The Wake
Pa couldn’t sleep the night through, not since Josh, his son, died.
It was the second day of the wake, a good few hours after the guests left.
His wife, exhausted, slept in the chapel pantry. Pa decided to take a smoke outside the chapel, his breather from being surrounded by people and the sickening-sweet scent of funeral flowers.
He lit up a Marlboro Red. As he inhaled the first smoke, he realized he’d been a smoker for twenty years now. Funny, he mused, that he has yet to be diagnosed for anything more serious. He smiled at his own wit, which hurt.
He still expects his son to show up.
It would have been just like a week ago, as if he had been late for dinner. Josh would rush in, breathless, apologetic. Pa missed being able to ask what took him so long, to chide and shake his finger at him.
He missed his lies, “School’s good.” “I’m fine.”
It was the truths that killed him, “I don’t have a girlfriend”, “I’m just going to the mall.”, “I love him so much, Pa.”
He remembered the “suicide shirt”. Would the story change if he caught him wearing it on the way out? If he had him change the shirt?
Pa put his light out. When he crossed that thought, he knew it was time to sleep – even if he had to fight for it.
No matter how many times he asked himself, the story stayed the same. Last week, his son took his wife’s gun with him to the mall. He killed his lover, four years older than him, before turning the gun on himself.
Was that really his son? Pa wondered. The same young boy that did well in school, loved his costume play, anime, and internet – kept a boyfriend and stocked all the love he had in him, to the point that everything else didn’t even compare?
Pa had cried and screamed when he identified the body. A small part of him still did not believe it, even as he read about in the papers. It only dawned on him when they agreed to donate Josh’s eyes.
Then, it only made sense, as he realized with some horror that a barrel of the gun would have been the last image imprinted there.
Just one shot, and they’d all wake up.
I wish, sighed Pa, as he sank into an empty pew.
He wished that all he’d have to do is wake up, and he’d back at home for that day –
He’d catch his son on the way out and ask him to change the shirt. Stay for lunch. Chat.
And less painful truths would come of it.