Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for violence.
Jasmine lifts the phone to her ear, listening carefully as the kind-sounding man tells his sorrowful story of a grown son who refuses to have anything to do with his father. She lowers the phone and stomps over to her husband’s office, giving him a heavy mouthful about how he never once mentioned his own father to her.
The husband winces. Throws his hand to his temples. She doesn’t know the real story.
He puts on his leather coat and grabs his keys from the hanger.
***
Al glared out the open window to the sound of birds singing amongst the falling autumn leaves, children playing noisily across the streets of the small town. A crisp breeze blew against his face, the fresh smell of clean air finding its way up his aging nose. He loved the outdoors.
He slammed the window shut with a thunderous thump. The breeze stopped completely.
He turned and faced the small, cramped office. The light was dim and the air was congested, the only furnishing being a few hard, uncomfortable office chairs and a faded desk. A musky, unpleasant odor hung in the air. Standing in the middle of the room was his young adult son, Gerald.
“Why did you call me here?” Gerald asked in a vexed tone of voice. “So you can yell at me? Punch me in the mouth? Or are you going to kick me in the balls. I know how much you love kicking me in the balls.”
“I called you here to apologize,” Al snarled, clenching his meaty fists, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t always treat you the way I should’ve. I want you back in my life.”
“But I don’t need you back in mine.” Gerald didn’t once look at his father, keeping his eyes fixated on the worn desk in front of him. He turned towards the door. “I don’t know how you got her number, but next time you want to call my wife trying to pull some garbage sob story to get me here in front of you, don’t. Don’t talk to her. Don’t talk to my kids. And don’t talk to me.”
Al smiled as Gerald wrapped his pale hand around the doorknob. “What are you doing these days?” Al asked.
Gerald retracted his hand and shivered. “I’m still writing stories.”
“Writing.” Al cackled. “Making up those stupid stories? What are they about, huh? Let me guess. A murder mystery. Ha. God knows there aren't enough of those in the library.”
“My latest story is about an electrician who moonlights as a serial killer in Illinois. Slowly, he realizes that despite being a murderer, he's not as bad of a person as he thought he was.” Gerald straightened his leather coat. “It’s called Warm Meals and Dead Bodies.”
“It sounds like trash!” Al shouted. “What do you want to be? Some James Patterson wannabe? You’re never gonna get published! Nobody wants to read your stupid stories. How about you just give it up?”
“If I give it up---”
“I don't give a damn. You could’ve been a great
carpenter!” Al spat towards him son, who still refused to look in his direction.
“Our company has been in our family for a hundred and fifty years. My great,
great grandfather came from absolutely nothing to start it all on his own. You
were supposed to continue the lineage. You were supposed to take over once I’m
gone.”
“I don’t want to run your carpentry company,” Gerald said. “I want to write novels, and I want to be a teacher. That’s what I want to do. Why can’t you just accept that? Why can't you just accept what I want to do with my life?”
“You don’t even care about your family,” Al roared. “Your history. You’re an egotist. It’s not always about you want to do. It’s about me. It’s about what I want. I’m your father!”
“I don't even know why I came here,” Gerald said, putting his hand on the door again. “Teaches me not to dream big, you'll just end up disappointing yourself.”
Gerald stepped out of the office, into the hall. Al spun around. Took a deep, long breath.
Engulfed in anger, anger from the thought of the son he wanted, the son he never had, Al beamed his fist through the window, shattering it into pieces.
He stared at his blood-soaked palm and smiled, overwhelmed by a daunting plethora of emotions. A foul deed he'd thought of doing a million times. The son he never wanted. The son he still didn't want. The son he didn't have to have. Hurrying over to his desk, he rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a loaded pistol.
“Al!” a worker cried as he stormed through the hall after Gerald. “Al! What are you doing with that?”
“Al! Stop!”
“Don’t do it!”
Al aimed the gun towards the back of his son’s head and fired.
His jaw dropped as thick blood spewed from Gerald’s head like water from a fountain. The blood hit the floor with a plundering splat, soon painting the entire end of the hall a dark coat of crimson red.
Gerald turned around and finally looked his father in the eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was all too late. He tumbled to the ground, dead.
Al’s lips trembled and his body shook and shivered. His eyes began to water as the gun flew from his hands, and the realization of what he had done started to come alive. “No!” he said. “No, no, no. Please.”
He ran over towards Gerald’s body and began shaking his head. “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” he said, slapping and shaking his son’s dead body. “Please! Can’t you please come back…?”
He sniffled, his face now flooded with tears as he flipped his son’s body around, pulling off the leather coat and t-shirt underneath. He stuck his fingers into the wound and sloppily prying out the deadly bullet. “See! It’s gone now!” he exclaimed, holding the bullet between his fingers and forcing a smile. “Everything is going to be better…please, just…just come back, Gerald.”
The smile faded quickly as he remembered the cascading permanence of death. He dropped his son on the ground and laid next to him, the smell of the blood putrid and mortifying as he clutched the bullet in his palm. With his eyes wide open he laid there for several minutes, but the longing pain made it feel more like hours.
“I’ll…I’ll miss you,” he muttered as the police dragged him away towards their car.
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138,399 Literary Works • 672,114 Reviews
Hey Tigeraye!
First thing first, I have to say that when I started reading, I did not expect the ending. I will say that the drama in this made me completely skip reading it for grammatical things, but in a good and a bad way.
The good way is that it got me reading the story trying to find out just how far this would go. Once he pulled [*spoiler*] then I was pretty much sure what was going to happen with [*spoiler*] but I was expecting you to tie in what Gerald like to write a little more than you did, so I was surprised at that. I liked that.
The bad way is that I felt like it was done more for affect than for story. I mean, this is a story about a father and son trying to get along again when the father was a mean... roll of dirt... all of the son's life. I think you could make this a very powerful story without having [*spoiler*] by just delving into the emotional relationship and the feelings you say are welling within Al. Yes, it's not very manly to think about feelings, but I think if you added more of them, you wouldn't need a shock factor to keep me reading.
An area that I think you could really work up are where he's asked Gerald to come back and Gerald says no. If you took time right there to really delve into how much hatred Gerald felt and for what reason, then when he starts badmouthing his son for his choice of career I think it would make more sense as a reader. Right now, it's sort of out of the blue and counterproductive in my perspective for him to start badmouthing his son and he brings up the very thing that he knows is going to make them fight. I'd think he'd at least try to woo him over for a few minutes first.
Then again, it's more realistic to have him so dead set in his ways that he doesn't see that he's doing it again, the very thing his son left because of.
That being said, here are my nitpicks. When you use ellipsis ...) to make pauses or stutters or like "I'll...I'll miss you" then it looks sort of, off, because the ellipsis has only been used in that capacity for a short time compared to what it used to be, the dash -. Naturally it would look like "I'll- I'll miss you" in a book.
The ellipsis is used more as a way to omit text at the end of something, like "I'll..." and then not having him say anything else again. If this is more of an interrupted garbling of a message, then you definitely want to go with "I'll- I'll" or at the very least, if you do keep the ellipsis, put a space after it. "I'll... I'll" so that it looks more grammatically correct. As an ellipsis is an omission by it's traditional sense, it shouldn't be attaching two words together. Instead it works more like a comma, semicolon or colon.
My last nitpick is that when you had Al run out with the gun, I really didn't pick up on who was telling him to stop because at that point I was skipping a bit due to the intensity of the situation. You may want to emphasize that with some more actions of the co-workers such as them trying to grab him, or maybe running away or something. Having that noise in the room will draw out the suspense a little bit more too.
Overall, I felt like the drama in this was taking away from it because I really wanted to see you work through the emotions and relationship on a more down to earth level. While it might happen that people get shot over family disputes, I think it's more likely that Al wouldn't kill his son, but end up loathing him and fighting with him for the rest of his life. Unless Al was terminal or something, it's unlikely in my opinion that he would go to this extreme sense of rage from where he was trying to tell his son that he was a no-good-writer. These types of relationships, again in my opinion, usually boil up gradually and just simmer until there's no water left in the pot.
There were a few points in this story where you did that type of jump too, which I really liked. I liked the symbolic message Al gave us of slamming the window shut on something he loved. It was startling and caught my attention, a good hook.
Keep writing! I think the more you work on these short stories of yours, the better you're going to get at them and the more unique your plots are going to be.
thank you for reviewing
Hey there! Thought I'd stop by to review this today.
This is rather good as it is, particularly the beginning and the ending. The opening part in italics did a great job of drawing me in.
The end was also written well in terms of the prose - I liked how Al tried so desperately to 'fix' what had happened, even though it's just not possible. I will say, though, that a headshot pretty much kills someone instantly - there's no way Gerald could have turned around and tried to say something.
Your middle needs some work so that the ending has as much of a punch as you want it to have. Although this is sort of in Al's viewpoint, you don't show us very many of his thoughts at all, and so it's harder to understand both why he called his son here after years of not talking to each other, and what possesses him to shoot, and it's also harder to get a sense of his character and care about him.
Basically, right now the conflict feels shallow. In their shouting match, they too quickly get to the main issue they have with each other, and only argue about that. People don't tend to be quite so straightforward when they argue. I think you also need to show and examine the underlying emotions - why exactly it's so important to Al that his son be a carpenter. Is it that he wants control, or just wants someone to carry on his legacy? Is he worried that his son will be poor because he can't make money from the writing? And again, why contact his son again now? I feel like, if he's actually trying to make amends, it would take longer for him to blow up at Gerald.
Overall, give the arguments and emotions involved more depth so that the characters have more depth, and you'll have a solid story with a memorable ending.
I wrote this back in September and never published it, forgot about it until I was looking through my last years work. please do tell me what you think though.