He took his boy along the path to show him all the things he killed. The rifles were left behind, not in the truck, but at home, secure in the gun case. He had his fill of all that.
It’s been more than a year since he closed the shop and spent his golden moments organizing the nuts and bolts, the tools, cataloging all the broken things he could fix now that he had the time to get to them— “all the time in the world,” his wife told him every day.
But today was for him— the boy, not to fix anything, but shorten the silence between them.
With each footstep the dust stirred, their shop talk faded away and he heard his own death whispering to him somewhere further down the way.
There was the silence where it had been every day.
He wanted to get back to the car and drive away, just drive straight home, But he could only cry.
The boy remained silent. He shuffled his feet. Finally, he hugged the old man— a soft caress that barely touched the skin.
The old man raised his hands, a little, than to his boy’s shoulders feeling the large rip he torn into his boys T-shirt when he dared try to run away from his drunken fists.
The old man’s face turned red, tinging to purple. He pushed the boy away, dropping his hands to his side. He stiffened his spine and then turned and walked away from the boy. He drove away, leaving the boy behind. The dust inside him could never be forgiven and the bottle at home was demanding to be cuddled.
He would spend the rest of the day using the weed torch destroying anything that dare sprout on his barren land.
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