Shades Of Grey- A Short Story

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Shades Of Grey

All was black. He had seen his last light, like the last ray of sunshine leaving the earth at dusk on the evening of the apocalypse. There was no hope of a bright moon coming to him out of the darkness, or stars showing themselves, eager to be wished upon. No hope of tomorrow’s dawn to bring a rebellious flicker of light to his heart.

.  .  .

We are all logs on a wide river, being swept along in life, Watched. Some of us are big logs, destined to knock into others, to change the courses of other people’s lives for better or for worse through powerful decisions. Many of us are smaller logs, who drift along, our lives being changed indirectly by the bigger logs we never meet. We only change the courses of the smaller logs, through our brief encounters with them as we roll forever forwards. All these logs are affected by their personal route through the river, and no two routes are identical. Some meet rocks that stop them for a while, before they change their course. Others meet little resistance on their path, but the undercurrent that finally sinks them. Some logs sink early. Some duck under for a few seconds, so the Watcher may think they have been sunk, but to his surprise and delight, they bob back to the surface with all the defiance and tactlessness natural to humans.

The news hit Timmy like a particularly heavy steamroller, but it hit his father harder. The doctor used lots of words that he didn’t understand. Those he did know were almost as hard to contemplate. Shocked, he sat there. For what seemed like hours, his normally active mind drifted in and out of the conversation, sluggish with an overload of information, and thinking about logs on a river.

With his conscious mind, he heard Doctor Stephenson say “irreversible” and “permanent” and pulled himself out of the morass of his thoughts and back into the real world, in time to catch his father with tears in his eyes. It was the first time he had seen his father cry. It would also be the last. He sank back into his reverie.

No doubt this was his big rock, this illness, something he might take a long time to find a course around. His father was also bumping against the same rock, out of love and sympathy for his boy. They had been inseparable as logs since Timmy’s birth, nine years ago, influencing each other’s lives every day. They had been inseparable as people through their mutual love and respect from the day that Tim’s mother had died in a car-crash. She was just twenty-six, and Tim only three. It was his father who called him Timmy.

He was pulled roughly from his dreamland into the doctor’s office again when some leaflets were passed into his hand. He didn’t glance at them, as he sensed an awkwardness in the atmosphere, in the way his father was looking at him, collecting yet more leaflets and pressing them into his hands to get his attention. The doctor was looking at him impatiently, and Timmy had the feeling that he had been asked a question.

“Sorry Sir, I was thinking about…about how I am going to cope,” he mumbled, embarrassed. The doctor smiled, immediately all charm and understanding once again. He asked for the third time if Tim understood, and Tim said he did, and then they were allowed to leave the warm creams of the office, pamphlets in hand. The receptionist saw them leave, as she saw so many others: shoulders bowed under a weight not present before, arms crossed against a new dread harsher and colder than the chilly wind stirring up the autumn reds.

.2.

In his dad’s pick-up truck on the way home, there was silence. Timmy saw that his father was trying to find the right words to say how he felt, so he left him to it. He glanced at the man beside him, and, without realising what he was doing, began a process that would shape his days to come.

He took in the way his father’s back arched, as if carrying a heavy load. Once when he was younger, sat in the pick-up with his hair blowing in the wind like so many blades of grass, Timmy had asked his father why his back was bent like that.

“It’s all that carrying you around as a baby Timmy-my-boy,” his father had said with a twinkle in his eye. Timmy had protested, until his father had told him a story of sorrow. Of how he had lost his parents and his brother in a house fire when he was younger. He had been working in the fields with their neighbour, Higgins, and his boys at the time, raising a new fence along some land. When he got home he found his house razed to the ground, his family with it, and all he had ever known crushed by the falling timbers and consuming fire. His brother gone, and he had never apologised for borrowing his shirt and ruining it. His mother and father moved on, never again to offer him comfort. He moved in with the Higgins family, and they treated him like a son. He gained the house and land, but he wanted nothing to do with it, lending the land to Higgins, and leaving the plot where the house had been black and burnt. After a short while, he found happiness again in his love for Higgins’ daughter, Lucy. She was a few years younger than her new housemate, but she adored him, and him her. They became inseparable, re-built the old house together, married. Inseparable until the day the drunk driver took her life, and the life of Timmy’s unborn sister with it. Sorrow and Death were the reasons for his father’s hunched back.

Timmy took in the way the Sorrow and Death stayed in his father’s back, like it was a cage for all the misery of his father’s life. The creased face he wore was not creased at the brow from years of frowning, but at the eyes, where the wrinkles at the corners split off from one another. They had forced his father’s earlier tears from one river into many distributaries, flowing into the sea at his jaw. The maze of cracks and channels that framed this beloved face were wrinkles of laughter. Timmy spotted one on the bridge of his father’s nose, and thought that that wrinkle might be a new one. That wrinkle might be one his father had made today, to show his sadness for his son.

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As Timmy was scrutinizing every loving detail on his father’s face, and more besides, his father started to speak. Timmy could not remember most of what he had said afterwards, he was seeing his father properly for the first time. The way his coat melted around his body, the way his pockets were bulkily filled with useful things, the way his chin had a little dimple in the centre. Timmy saw for the first time why women found his father attractive, and Timmy felt for the first time a rush of gratitude towards his father for bringing him up alone, ...

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