FlashFiction.Net

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Here, for example, in my own short short "Truth," I began with the idea of a father seemingly abandoned by his alcoholic wife; the idea that his complete unhappiness resided inside his own naïve nature gives (I hope) the story a greater poignancy and helps make the ending more powerful than if the father were simply a victim of his ex-wife.

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My father will be dead in a few weeks. My mother called him to say, "I love you but I’m not in love with you."

I asked my father, as I held his hand and rubbed the sharp bones of his shoulder and back, what he would’ve wanted to hear from her. "Anything but that," he said, then coughed and wouldn’t stop until droplets of blood speckled my shirt, the sheets.

My father confessed after one of these fits that my mother would only be with him if she'd been drinking. I imagine him driving the station wagon—he called it the Red Whale—to Big Daddy's Tavern to grab a six-pack of Old Milwaukee pounders. I imagine him crying. I'd like to think that eventually, on one of those beer runs to Big Daddy's, he kept going rather than the truth, that, one day, my mother told him, even drunk, she didn’t want him.

What happiness can he find now? "Dad," I ask, "how can you still love her?"

"Do I?" Behind his eyes, pictures must be falling and I’ve got none that would see them happy. "She said she would take care of me. She’ll come, you’ll see."

She's in Lake Tahoe with her drunken fiancé. My father points toward the door. "Look, look."

I don’t need to. I see only the flickering in my father’s soon shut eyes.

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The father’s failures—his inability to let go of this vision of his self, his ex-wife, some possible future—led him down the path of inevitable and enduring doom. The tragic arises in such moments, and keeping the reasons a mystery to the son contributes to that sense of what the critic George de Schweintiz calls “a ‘universe’ in the throes of unresolved conflict and agony” (279). Such is the world that tragedy resides in—in those flickering eyes soon to be forever closed, but not yet; here, they shudder, a never-ending quiver.