Questions - Short Story (Cannery Row / Fall Edition 2025)

The routine is monotonous but safe, the work stable and therapeutic. Here on the ninth, I'm no nearer to any goal, but somehow further from harm. As my clock ticks away, I have been reborn; as a man of fear and regret. So many regrets and such pointless fear. Old, bad habits have become new and trusted friends, most of my actual friends now discarded in acts of petulance or self-isolation. I can just about see the faces of my children but don't feel them, can’t recall their gentle scents. Nor do I hear their little voices or get to answer the vital questions they ask. For no reason other than my own, I have become alone and, for the first time, lonely. Lost in this shell of flesh and bone, I see no way of escape. The past few years I crumbled into the person I am now, so full of self doubt and loathing, no more questions to ask, waiting only to die. I am empty, have nothing left to give.

I know I've let you all down, and I'm sorry. I just couldn't take any more . . .

Like a slow, deep-breathing chest, a single torn-out sheet of notebook paper rises and falls in the gentle breeze coming in from the open window. Soon someone would find it. And the man who wrote it.

---

Mornings felt like the worst time. Sitting beside the small bed in the dark, the waiting was almost a relief compared to what would come.

Around 7 a.m. the boy would stir, his little body slowly coming to terms with the light of a new day. Should he run his fingers through the boy's hair, could he? The time it took to decide stole the moment from him and the boy was up and running to his mommy’s room. Everyday, regular as clockwork, the boy would greet his mommy with long hugs and staccato kisses. Sometimes they would just lie there, the boy held tightly in her arms telling stories crafted from his gifted imagination, tales of robots or dinosaurs, or the latest animal he had read about. Other times the boy needed to play, desperately wanting her to join in. Usually, mommy listened or would get up to play, other times she seemed vague, in a way distant. But always, and every morning, she was there. The man looked on, heart broken, his voice now silenced. He could only watch the scene play out, no influence permitted. Morning routines then followed. Brushing his teeth, washing his face, getting dressed, having breakfast. The routines of his mommy ran in parallel, often coordinated but not always in step. Amid these routines many things were missing, removed as his punishment. 

He was learning to accept this, but there was something else, a lost detail finely engineered out; even without its chain, you know how a bicycle works. Some days these omissions puzzled him, other days the irritation ate away at him until the boy returned.

Mommy, the boy would ask, when is daddy coming back? She’d had to construct a range of holding answers and often he would have her work through them all in one day. He tried to make deals with her: If I draw daddy a picture, will you send it to him so he knows we are here? Followed up swiftly by: Will you tell me where you send it?

These questions cut into the man. A succession of slowly drawn, inch-deep incisions as with a blunt instrument. But nothing hurt more than the question the boy was yet to ask. The man's anxiety - or what he now took to be anxiety - over how an answer might make the boy feel, disorientated him. It made him want to curl up into a ball and just disappear. But that was not possible; for as we all lack degrees of control in our lives, he lacked them all. 

To give his new state some perspective, some sense, he coined it 'puppetry', forced day in and day out to be in one place, for one thing alone. He couldn’t yet bring himself to give it its real name: Purgatory. Daddy questions usually led to fits of raw emotions, tears, sometimes sanctions and then silence. And, during that silence, something unseen would be at work, hidden from his view. The man felt it but he never quite understood what it was. The boy was elsewhere and the man was not privy to the exchange. Shielded, or protected? The former would seem to be more obvious as clearly the heads of purgatory favoured exposure over tact, and pain over compassion.

And so the boy grew up and the man watched. Questions about daddy stopped, replaced by bigger questions of life and purpose. There were many answers the man wished to provide but was not able to, not allowed to. Passive, powerless and yet present; left only with what he assumed to be a feeling of frustration. Growing daily within him, subsiding, to then grow again. Deeper cuts from the dull-edged knife.

Such an active little boy! Summer days spent running in the park, dodging water fountains, his ever-so-confident interactions with other children. The first few critical paces pushing off on a scooter, before speeding away on his bike, to tricks on a skateboard. Winter nights of school plays, jigsaw puzzles, artistic and Lego masterpieces. The man had now created a sorrowful bucketlist of many things he wished he'd done, or done more of, with the boy. Things his cold heart and misplaced attention had once prevented. And there at the very top: to just be there and hold him when the boy was hurt or feeling sad. He got to marvel at how resourceful the boy became in solving problems but that sensation of joy, along with the marvelling itself was quickly replaced with nothingness. Sometimes it would be the empty anxiety of knowing one day the question was coming. More often than not it was just the sadness of the situation. And sadness, it seemed, remained with him; crushing, dense sadness. And always there, but never actually there, was that missing element. Getting ever stronger, more frequent, leading to longer periods without the boy in his watchful focus.

---

Time went by and the man began to wonder, what happens when the boy leaves home? Where will I go? What will happen to me? His worries were of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. He had given up any right to them and would go wherever the boy went. Only as a bystander, an inert, slowly fading memory.

The family had moved several times, it was easier that way, and the man went with them. Often money was a big source of worry but they always had food, and each other. From time to time mommy would have a friend in her life. Some the boy would warm to, would draw comfort, knowledge and skills from. Others caused him pain and every pain the boy endured was magnified within the man. Not in a physical sense, for the man was beyond such things. It came as something indescribable, so much more corrosive than pain. The elusive presence that was missing from his focus seemed to somehow help ease the pain of the boy. He would be removed from the man for a while, then return consoled, recharged even.

Not so the man. He carried everything inside, the whole range of bad experiences compounded in him over the years. There were no tears left for him to cry; madness and rage, over time, were all he knew. And anxious dread of knowing that one day the boy would learn why daddy went away, and how. The man saw a few friends of mommy's trying to use this knowledge in heated moments, always to ill advantage. He loved her for the way she protected the boy and admired how she had coped but, clearly, the day of discovery was drawing near. The ghastly answer would soon be unavoidable and, for years, he'd thought through how the painful revelation might best be delivered, the ways in which such an awful act might be so rationalised to the boy as to shield him from its full impact. In those years he wrestled with the self hatred it conjured in him and with that came aching futility; it was not for him to decide anymore. Whatever the circumstances, or vehicle, it was not to be of his choosing. Choice was another right he had relinquished long ago.

---

And so the boy became a man - shaving cuts, fashion and girls. So much wisdom the man knew he could offer, but would never get a chance. And so much conflict building up inside him, remorse washing over him in much the same way the boy splashed water upon his face during his morning routine. And what use was remorse? What relief might there be in having such a crippling sensation cleaned away when relief had also ceased to be a right, many years ago.

The day the boy found out the truth was followed by so many days of darkness. As if the light in his young soul had been snuffed out. And, besides having all the boy's pain to contend with, his mommy had to relive it all over again, her mind tormented anew. The man, who in recent years had found some form of tenuous balance in his position, was destroyed. The destruction was such as to challenge any notion of justice, or compassion; two more of the many  things he had no right to. The boy learned how his daddy had taken his own life. Lowering himself naked from a ninth floor window, hanging from bed sheets wrapped around his neck, tied to an interior door. People rarely look up these days and his lifeless body had hung there for several hours.

In many cases the human spirit possesses great resilience, as it was with the boy. Over time and talk, some acting out and repercussions, he struggled onwards to come to terms with the wretched event of his youth. Of why his daddy hadn't come back, the dark, fatal choice he'd made. He’d read the suicide note left behind, over and over, absorbed it in a way many readers seldom do. In some way with a little context supplied - a marriage breakdown, heavy drinking, the constant work and money troubles that followed - perhaps he even understood. For, by now, he was a man too and felt he might share some of those feelings as well. But he was stronger and his life a very different experience.

Seeing this, the man was allowed a brief moment of joy. It seemed as though his act of surrender had served some purpose, albeit an unintentional one. And then the moment was gone, the feeling of nothing being the only right he had left. And with one discovery came another. The missing element, erased from his mind, guarded from his view, was finally, brutally, revealed to him.

He also had a daughter, a beautiful thing, now fully grown with a young family of her own. What little heart he had both collapsed at her existence being taken from him all these years and rejoiced in her now before him. Ghostly tears welled up in his eyes as her life played out in a brief, fleeting time lapse; moments she'd spent consoling the boy, cheering him up, her tears and troubled emotions, bad boyfriends, abuse from one of mommy’s friends. Then all was gone before he could capture a single detail. Just like a reel of film exposed to sunlight, every hurried frame faded out. And, in that one stomach-turning instant, he found himself shifted to her home. 

The girl had a son, no more than three-years-old. The mornings felt like the worst time . . .

 

Massive thanks to Tanja Rabe at Cannery Row Press for the editorial and motivational support

https://www.canneryrowpress.com/magazine