"I'm Sorry"

         Thick black clouds covered the sky, heavy with threatening rain. In one

house, a dog reared up on its hind legs and began barking at a squirrel

munching a nut on the lawn. Thunder crackled, shouting its fury for all to

hear. In one of the many huge homes on this particular street, a boy sat on

his bed looking through the window, his eyes unseeing, and his mind in a

far-off place. He was lost within his memories.

         He recalled another stormy day, much like this one, when he had sat on this

same bed, nearly a year ago. He had not been staring at nothing then,

though. That day he had been engrossed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship

of the Ring. Anyone looking at him might have thought him dead if it hadn’t

been for his hand turning page after page after page. And they might have

been right; his mind had fled to the dreamscape of the story.

         He didn’t look up as his father came into the room. The exclamation that

of “I’m going to the store,” said louder than it should have been, fell upon

deaf ears. The only acknowledgement of someone addressing him was a

murmured, “OK.” The door slammed, but the boy never noticed. His mind

never wandered from Tolkien’s fantasy world until hours later, when he had

reached the end of the book.

         Stretching legs that moved painfully after having been sat on for so long,

he rose, wondering absently where his father was. Then he remembered the

slamming door, his own noncommittal “OK.” How long ago had that been?

         A year later, a single hot tear flowed down the boy’s cheek. It had taken

him two hours more to realize a simple fact. His father wasn’t coming home.

His mother told him the whole story later. His father had had a hard night

at work the night before, and had come home drunk. That had been the cause

of the slamming door, the seemingly pointless anger. And it had been the

cause of his death.

         The child’s mind fast-forwarded to the funeral. He had been uncomfortable

in his stifling black suit. He had been uncomfortable hugging people of

whom he had no recollection. But most of all, he had been uncomfortable

standing so close to the closed casket that contained the body.

         The graveyard. As the pastor murmured the potent prayers that would assist

his father to Heaven and the casket was lowered into the ground,

heart-wrenching sobs escaped the boy, and he did not try to hide nor wipe

his tear-stained eyes.

         A year later, remembering all this, sobs equal to the ones he had cried

that horrible morning shook his body once again. Before his finger pulled

the trigger of the gun aimed steadily at his own head, he murmured three

words: “I’m sorry, Dad.”