Echo

He had not been expecting a letter. When he'd pictured this eventuality, he'd always considered a phone call most likely. In his daydreams he'd imagined the phone ringing at three or four in the morning, waking him from sleep. Calls that early were never good news. He could even picture the conversation and the tone of his brother's voice when he said "Hey Scott... Dad's passed."

The call might have come from another sibling or even his nephew. The conversation might have been a little different with undertones and nuances of tonality conveying unspoken emotions beyond grief of death. He could in fact picture limitless ways that the news could have been dropped on him, but he never thought it would come typed on the letterhead of some probate attorney.

He swirled his glass of whiskey unconsciously and took a long drag from his cigarette. Exhaling the smoke into the growing, misty haze he contemplated this sudden crack in his universe. More correctly he was contemplating whether or not this actually was a crack in his universe. It had been 20 years since he had spoken to his father. He remembered the last conversation he had shared with the man who raised him. The old goat had stood there chiding him about his future. He'd always had an insatiable desire to criticize Scott's life choices at every opportunity. This had become almost comical for Scott because his father had spent most of his waking hours inebriated and jobless. As time passed, the things the two men had in common had dwindled until the last remaining interest they shared was the bottle.

There lives within the soul of every man a black beast which can never be conquered, but merely temporarily repleted, and even the greatest men occasionally fall victim to the guile of these inner monsters. Souls open briefly like the door to a prodigious inferno, and the fire and flames explode forth until the door can, often only with Herculean effort, be slammed shut and the fire locked away once more. Such was the case that night, as Scott and his bottle stood face to face with his father and his father's bottle, and his beast gained control. In its wake was left the blame for the death of his mother, the failure of the family business, and every other misfortune which had ever set upon the hapless old man. The flames from the father roared out to meet his own - flakes of skin rubbed from knuckles and red liquid streamed from wounded lips. The fire and the whiskey burned, and the taste of blood etched itself indelibly into Scott's psyche. Hatred and feelings of being disowned were the words which had last left his inferno before he closed it tight once more, and his father had stood quivering in an emotional tangle of rage and regret.

Scott rubbed his stubbled jaw and ran his hand up and over his thinning hair. Though the memory rekindled his anger, he still waged war against the feelings of sadness, and even pity for the shaking old man in his mind's eye. He downed the rest of his drink, and as he started toward the kitchen for a refill, the letter fell to the floor and instantly became an invisible fragment of camouflage in what seemed to be a million scraps of paper strewn across the dull, beige carpet. His bathrobe hung unabashedly open as he shuffled from his chair. He clinked his smeared, dirty glass onto the grimy marble counter, and with a paucity of dexterity he unscrewed the cap from the Jameson, filled the receptacle, and then replaced the bottle into the cabinet. He spun on one heel with thoughts of his father in his mind, and dragged his hand with the whiskey absently over the counter. Something scraped his knuckles and sparked a pain response in his arm. Without thinking he withdrew his hand, and the yellow liquid with its glass plummeted to the floor, crashing on the tile. He cursed aloud and examined his hand closely. While sucking the blood from a small cut, he turned his attention to his assailant. On the counter, lay a framed photograph of his son - the glass shattered by its apparent tumble from the wall. The smiling teen, clad in a cap and gown, stared up at him. He thought about that day - it was so long ago. His mind stuttered, and he realized he could not find the date in his memory. And as he probed his memory further, he realized that he could not remember the last time they had spoken. His monster within then shuffled restlessly, caught up in a dream of some past event. Scott closed the door on the beast, and found himself a new glass.