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sad backstory dream #1
Call him a pessimist, but the boy had started digging his father's grave a few days ago.
Before, the treatments he'd used had been effective at soothing his father's symptoms. As time dragged on, and he got sicker and sicker, they stopped doing anything altogether. It was obvious that he wasn't going to get better. He was wasting away to nothing, and more than once his son wondered if it would just be more humane to let him starve.
A child wasn't the ideal caretaker, of course. He fidgeted, measured incorrectly while trying to mix medicine, burned the food he prepared for his father on more than one occasion. Despite his mistakes, the boy always did his best, even after realizing his father would never recover. It was an obligation he felt he was beholden to, so he watched his father wither away while he futilely attempted to at least ease the pain.
When his father died, it was a small, quiet thing. One minute he was breathing, and the next he wasn't. It seemed as though something had left him, paradoxically leaving him looking heavier than before.
The burial site was a short distance from the family's residence; the boy had decided early on that when his father died, he would be laid to rest next to his wife. The only memory the boy had of her - the only one he could remember with absolute certainty - was helping his father bury her. She had been pristine in death, her already pale face drained of any remaining warmth, her arms neatly folded above her chest. His father wouldn't be so lucky. After all, there wasn't an adult to carry his body, so it took a fair amount of exertion on the boy's part to drag and push the corpse into its final resting place.
It was a sad excuse for a burial. There were no words said, no prayers recited, just the sound of dirt filling a hole.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound. In fact, with no witnesses, there's no way to prove that anything fell in the first place. If the boy told himself that, then it would mean he had never really cried after all.
Before, the treatments he'd used had been effective at soothing his father's symptoms. As time dragged on, and he got sicker and sicker, they stopped doing anything altogether. It was obvious that he wasn't going to get better. He was wasting away to nothing, and more than once his son wondered if it would just be more humane to let him starve.
A child wasn't the ideal caretaker, of course. He fidgeted, measured incorrectly while trying to mix medicine, burned the food he prepared for his father on more than one occasion. Despite his mistakes, the boy always did his best, even after realizing his father would never recover. It was an obligation he felt he was beholden to, so he watched his father wither away while he futilely attempted to at least ease the pain.
When his father died, it was a small, quiet thing. One minute he was breathing, and the next he wasn't. It seemed as though something had left him, paradoxically leaving him looking heavier than before.
The burial site was a short distance from the family's residence; the boy had decided early on that when his father died, he would be laid to rest next to his wife. The only memory the boy had of her - the only one he could remember with absolute certainty - was helping his father bury her. She had been pristine in death, her already pale face drained of any remaining warmth, her arms neatly folded above her chest. His father wouldn't be so lucky. After all, there wasn't an adult to carry his body, so it took a fair amount of exertion on the boy's part to drag and push the corpse into its final resting place.
It was a sad excuse for a burial. There were no words said, no prayers recited, just the sound of dirt filling a hole.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound. In fact, with no witnesses, there's no way to prove that anything fell in the first place. If the boy told himself that, then it would mean he had never really cried after all.