Four Words

Ceru says goodbye to his father.

We arrived at the dock as shadows grew, the wind as fierce as anything I could remember on this world or any other. The whole landscape seemed a palette of unforgiving grays from the sky dull to the dock sheen. Splattered against this achromous canvas, ships of all makes and sizes, hue faded hulls, bobbed like mobiles on the teetering edge of Hyneria’s crib as numbered flags flapped and yelped like skittish kites anxious to flee their tethered mounts. We felt as babes, and about as small, before an angry mother spewing wind and rain for reasons beyond our comprehension. Powerlessness, I suppose, carries its own phlegmatic resignation, and, oddly enough, a sense of peace, or perhaps just the peace that comes when responsibility and authority has been arrogated by a higher power.

On the platform before us, pockets of goodbyes huddled against the blustery elements, coats brown and grey and black held tight, like so many charcoal smudges, as families longed to slow the hands of time, to hope against hope that if they filibustered long enough, the clouds would cede and the sun would emerge and an announcement would blast news for everyone to return home, the crisis over. Forced smiles looked grotesque, almost as if at any moment they would crack and mothers sported raccoon eyes and crimson noses as words were selected with more care than the forgotten diamonds on their hands. Into this emotional wasteland, Ceru and I leaned into the wind, our hands firmly on our hats, our final goodbye more dreamlike than one would have thought.

We searched for a place to call our own, a place to do in public what should have been private; one had the feeling of urinating in the street, sober, and nobody cared. The whole matter was simply a distasteful nightmare, but one we would not have missed for all the world. When our feet found root, we twisted toward each other, hands finding shoulders as branches seeking support. I would rather not say what we said other than various terms of endearment and hope; promises, we left on the table, since there was no reason for either of us to play those games.

After a hug like two school girls after summer recess, I turned toward Bravo and had not taken more than three or four steps when Ceru yelled Dad. I turned, he upon me, package in hand. He said four words and thrust what appeared to be a box into my chest. Before the tears, from either of us, could flow, he turned and walked away. His gray longcoat swallowed by the interminable misty bleakness. There is a reason to turn. I wish I had. The vision of his backside disappearing, as if consumed by the sea, haunts me to this day and there are times, when the vision is so clear, that my heart threatens to burst, pound, from my chest, as if I have committed some crime. That was the last time I saw my son, the last view I had, the last image ingrained in my mind.

“What were the four words?” asked Kyra, her eyes as misty as Ceru’s must have been.

Von looked at her as if the words would come forth when they were ready, not him. After what could have only been a few seconds he said as distant as if he were back on the dock, “I love you dad.”

Reviews

[AutumnStorm]

Pause. When writing is this good and emotions run this deep, pauses are needed. To recuperate, to absorb the heretofore of what has been gleaned, to calm so that one is once again ready to climb to the heights to which this story takes the reader. Sounds like sex, which wasn't my intention, but it's a pretty good analogy. Except the aftermath lasts, I'm fully convinced, forever. These reviews are not easy to write for to do so is to live within the story and to live within the story is to be flooded by awe quality and beauty of the writing and the meaning within, the actual happenings and the eternal windows that are swung open there from. An evening, a night's sleep and a morning and I still was not completely ready for the onslaught that this chapter provoked. For the ache and for the joy snaking together like a DNA strand. This is a favourite. There are several of those here already, this one demands it is mentioned. '..Pockets of grey..' is a phrase that is unforgettable and often recalled. The writing in the chapter before this one blew me away and as I sit here, I'm not certain that the writing was even mentioned in my review. The writing in this one was a twelve on the Beaufort too. Apt, given content. Too many times, I've used the word paint, and yet is there a better way to describe what you do. It makes me want to paint. To express (release) in some way the images formed, the sensations inspired. So much so, it caused a little visual, attire included :-D, deck, view Valla-like, canvas, brush, paints, one standing, one seated, one listening, one reading, reading sentence by sentence, painting sentence by sentence. Fantasies, fantasies. :-) In all seriousness though, it is overwhelmingly good and neither distance nor time dulls its impact, merely moves it to the side a little as others approach. The gift you have for expression is majestic and as much and more as anything that I have read, to do so is to appreciate and wonder at the magic of writing, of art in any form, how one person is able to create, to create something that was not there before, something individual to them that would not have existed were it not for them, from the heart or from the soul, both, from some place divine and evoke a response in that same place, like breath shared, a pouring of the beauty of one soul into another and just for that moment, there is a blindness to all, or rather the brightness is staggering and whole and one realizes one is seeing the essence, the sacred beauty of a spirit. Pure is something we all recognize and respond to.
Recognition and response as you touch upon the moments in your characters lives, as you move them through ground that each of us touches in some way...still not finding a good way to say what I want to say, all of the above and through all the pages, and to repeat, their hearts beat, and they beat within our own, their happy is ours, their [insert complete range of emotions] is ours and it is all good, it is all standing at the edge of a cliff, arms outstretched, embracing the elements as sea and heavens show their might.