Sunset Porch

Sunset Porch

         The sun was melting orange into the hills on the horizon as my family sat on the back porch to watch it settle,  its breathtaking rays of light peeling the pink clouds besetting it to rest its golden visage at the edge of the world,  and my father asked me a question: "Son, what do you want to do with your life?"

         Baffled by this sudden question I looked at my mother, her eyes wide in light of this intrusion on the sunset, yet her face held no answer, my little brother, his ears turning redder by the second, stopped smashing two Fisher Price tow-trucks to look up at me, turn his head slowly to our father, and then hang back toward his toys in the awkward silence that held the porch captive.  Yet, it was then, at the moment in which I was at such a loss for words, my father's gaze piercing me like a spear, my mother's head batting back and forth between husband and son, and my brother's eyes tearing up in the thick aberrant air, that I came upon a revelation, "I want to live."

         His gaze lightened, his arms uncrooked from their perch upon his chest, the creases of a hard day's work softened, a sigh of wind whispered through his hair, and he stared back at the waning sun in silence, leaving me to ponder my answer alone.

         He said nothing as the Great Orb descended mercilessly upon the horizon, burning it's way through the earth, nothing as the last sliver pierced the mantle of the world, nothing until the my mother had gone to clean up supper, my brother and fallen asleep in his miniature fold-up chair, the crowned hills were dethroned in a radiant array of fading light, and darkness took hold over us that he said, "Goodnight" and stepped out of the cold night air.

         I was crushed in my fathers dissolution, his sour leave; he did not acknowledge my answer, he said nothing, he asked a malicious question, one which Greek scholars had barely attuned, which only the Gods could truly know, and yet when the answer was lain at the proscenium of my being, he says nothing.

         And in this poignant confusion, I cried.

         But irony has a funny way of ruining a mood, its heavy footsteps pounding the hallway at the back of the house, its eyes glazed in tears, the creases of a hard day's work slowly returning; it slowly stepped onto the back porch, yet stayed hidden in the darkness.  It clunked to its son who was turning his tear-streaked face to meet its, and whispered, "Sorry, just got a little something in my eye," and it held me for what seemed a year; fathers don't cry.

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I like to Write, and couldn't' have shown it better than with a bit of Flash Fiction.

~Tilli.