The Walking Stick

A short story

I only write at night.

The house is quiet. No one is left.

A bulb burns in my book cupboard. Door slightly open. A thin yellow wedge of stained carpet in the darkness.

It was my fault. I see that now.

After the accident I wasn’t the same. Couldn’t connect with them. Didn’t have a grip on my temper.

Then, later, the smell and the flies. It all got too much.

The door and a little more light.

I miss them.

I miss all of them.

My wife and son finally sneaking out this morning whilst I slept.

My mother, taken by dementia, five years now.

My father soon after of a broken heart, but mostly from the cancer that ravaged him.

Lying in his hospital bed. Burning up, but still trying to whisper the same stories he told me when I was a child. Gasping out his last. Almost faded to nothing. The walking stick, dark wood against almost translucent skin, held close to his chest.

I look at it’s carved lion head lying on my desk.

Brighter now. A soft thump on the floor.

It came from Hungary. Part of a business trip my wife went on. An old place up in the mountains. The carpenter took nothing for it. Shared a glass of Palinka and handed it over. A gift for my father to add to his collection. It became his favourite.

The handle, smoothed by his rough hands, but the jaws still wide open in a snarl.

I snapped it. Can’t remember how. After that everything went bad.

A groan. The hinge creaks. I turn my seat and the light from the cupboard spills over me. It’s cold. A rasping breath.

The old seat where I read books to my son as he bounced on my knee.

My father, in his threadbare funeral suit, sits there now. Black eyes staring implacably from sunken sockets in a shrivelled pallid skull. His mouth hangs open with lips cracked over brown, peeling teeth. The gnarled, liver spotted hand, dirt still under the finger nails, holds the rest of the walking stick. He watches me. The house is quiet.

I only write at night.