FANS
by Barbara Anne Helberg
FANS Chapter Seven Excerpt — Destiny?
He had gone on for awhile, two years, perhaps. What had he gone on with after that? After the truck accident, he had shriveled, turned his back on life and the pursuit of anything worthy. His wife and son had suffered the results of his quitting. He had let the devastation track him. A bit of fate, he had said bitterly. Destiny…a dead sister, sweet little Sarah, a broken marriage after the accident, a distant son, the divorce. His effort in his short-lived marriage had mocked the tried and true forty-year union of his hard-working, loving parents. His failure with a vengeance to pick up the pieces after the accident had fed his bitterness and cost him everything. Pumping gas, drinking, chili and chips loneliness, Lizzie and Mark left in the ashes of his burning non-response. That’s what he’d gone on to. Some destiny, he thought.
Destiny? Rodd queried himself. His life had been more like forced imprisonment in a cycle of sorrow, bitterness, and impotency in every niche of his existence. He hadn’t seen his parents, or even corresponded with them in a decade, since his attachment to the bottle had detached him from his previous living experiences. His dad couldn’t find an excuse for him. His mother expressed her sweet love for him. He turned away. Grief over Sarah’s passing was explainable, they said. They had all suffered that and each of them had reconciled his feelings and put them aside, let go and moved on. After his college drop-out, over which they argued, then his inexcusable recession into continuous drunken bouts and neglect of his family, over which they parted ways, his parents, already in their sixties, had chosen retirement in Florida. Rodd hadn’t seen them again.
He hadn’t tipped a bottle once over the last ten months, and the question of his destiny, recently, had been a daily replay. He wanted to see Mark.
Rodd stared at The Blade page. Destiny, he thought. Herman Archmiller is dead at fifty-six — his destiny? To die in a locker room at West Central High School? Or someone else’s game plan? Why? Tapping his fingers on The Blade, looking straight at the wall, Rodd made up his mind.
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*** Credit:
FANS Excerpt and Artwork from the personal and copyrighted collection of Barbara Anne Helberg
