Last Father’s Day

• Nick Shortland, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2021

She knelt against the tarnished concrete, staring beyond the neglected sight of the crack down the middle as if gazing into a reflection unfamiliar. Droplets fell beneath her, staining the concrete with a passion forgotten.
The inchoate scene, painted with the monotone brush of the cloudy sky, sat just outside the tarmac, laying on top of the withered grass that once shone under the dreams of old – the light brown tinge littering the forsaken lawn either side of the weeping girl.
Faces, belonging to blurry figures either side of the road, stood behind the scene, watching. Their obscure presence only served to embroil the girl within the confusion piercing her soul, a misunderstanding not realised nor intended. She had no wish to yell to them, no desire to ask why they merely gazed upon her misfortune. Instead, her shattered mind lay waste against the barrier of her limited understanding, bound by an innocence of her age now threatened.
Beside her, a thud of misery disrupted the sombre air – the distraught outline of another figure. She was close to the girl, her voice recognisable even through her indiscriminate emotion, a violent broth of opaque hatred and an abrupt melancholy. Her words, deprived of the same voice once able to speak them, couldn’t reach past her own mind. She fell, isolated by the hollowness forced upon her, a vision of pity neglected to the daughter beside her. A lack of resolve plaguing her as she felt jilted by the fractured ideals of which she had so valued in the man.
The man in question, a dark shadow of lost virtue, the figure of intimate importance to the girl and woman now laying in anguish behind his guilty path. Though, it was vivid to all that his wistful struggle could not heal the deep wounds inflicted upon those he only desired to cherish. This was the resignation of his darkest secrets kept, leaving his eyes a marbled mix of a crimson sorrow and glistening regret.
The girl, his daughter, now lay with a broken childhood. She knelt there, against that driveway, watching the trees afar stand tall – they were so familiar to her, yet now she felt as if they were walking away, a dread of past memories leaving her without explanation. He could see this in her; her fleeting reality that now consumed her young body, a weakness forced upon her by his failure.
She could barely watch through cloudy eyes as the men in blue ushered him in the car, their strange uniforms glowing under the vibrant colours of red and blue emanating from the roof. The last thought he left her with were words spoken by a whimpering voice of punishing regret: “Daddy loves you, my beautiful adventurer. D-daddy just has to go on a long adventure by himself, okay, and I promise I’ll take you on the next.”
She held to this familial promise given to her, yet the years trampled on this hope with each passing day.