• The rain came down in sheets, battering the landscape below it. Jared thought of it as a sort of mocking rain, even though everyone else was relieved that it brought the end to the dry spell the town had been experiencing. It was mocking his pain, his pain and his sorrow and his anger.

    He threw the curtains back in disgust, trying to keep his emotions under control. He looked back and a sharp pain went through his chest like a cold metal dagger. There was Naomi, sitting by a large, wood-framed bed, covered in sheets that were splattered with blood from countless hours of coughing and hacking, holding a hand that was gripping hers so hard back it was making her own fingers bleed. The sheets were drawn up to the chin of the shivering and wracking ghost of a man that was now their father, wasting away at his deathbed.

    Deathbed. Jared was sure of it this time. After almost a year of his father insisting that he was fine, that he should go back to work, this was what he became. Almost a year of his mother pushing him back into bed and locking the door behind her to make sure he stayed...

    Jared’s hands subconsciously rolled into fists, turning his knuckles white. How could he let this happen? A year ago, he had insisted his father not go walk to work in the pouring rain. How short a year feels. His father, a very old fashioned kind of man, never invested in a car. His mother complied, never needing one herself either. He came home fine, but over the course of two weeks he developed a cough, but didn’t see a doctor. Weeks turned to months, and nearly seven months later, seven cough- and fever-filled months, he went to a doctor.

    There was no hope for him at that point.

    What really put him over the edge was their mother’s disappearance. When Lucy Rose never came home. It was hardest for Naomi to accept it, who thought of her as a best friend as well as a mother, but they both moved on. Their father never did.

    A week after Lucy disappeared, Naomi couldn’t find their father. Jared found him locked in his office, and by the time he had unlocked it, it was too late. Jared could almost see the whirrs of imaginary ice surrounding the iron knife that protruded grotesquely from their father’s chest, missing his heart by only inches. He could hear the demented laughs of death itself echoing across the dusty walls and frames on the hanging pictures. Jared never believed it was shock speaking to him in slurring tongues with a cold voice, mocking his freshly slewed father.

    Naomi was able to save him, but he ended up dying a more horrible, slow death, moaning his wife’s name to his daughter through blind and hallucinating eyes.

    “It’ll be okay.” Naomi whispered through a curtain of misty tears, rubbing his hand between hers.

    “Lucy…” He wheezed, his gray-blue eyes, like dusk over the sea, and much like Jared’s, were focusing and un-focusing while he moaned and convulsed. He went into another fit of coughing. No medicine could cure him, not now. “Lucy… don’t… don’t go…”

    “I won’t, dad.” She said, and his hand slackened in hers.

    Naomi wept over his body, and closed his eyes that were last used to search his final room for his absent wife.

    Jared slammed the door behind him.