The Race Home(short story page-3)

 

          The addendums of banality seized me nearly every day, and off to the woods I’d traipsed to find that selfish contentment that I longed for because my dad was dying right before my eyes and the freedom to get away was my only release from this melancholic meltdown. My dad eventually died and not on any day but on New Year’s Eve. We buried him 3 days later on the coldest day on record, I literally shivered and my tears froze before they dropped down from my face. Prior to my dad’s death I lost my dearest and best friend Rusty Bradley that very same year and it was the saddest year up till this point in my life. The gloom still enraptured me and the only thing that gave me relief was a stiff drink from time to time. The haunts of one’s lifetime is the purest Hell one can relive over a million times and still have the same outcome of misery each time, the reflection of despair is often a blank mirror of emptiness that is an achromatic black hole of regret, life’s payback is an unfortunate overload and overkill of conscience and memory. 

         One half of a year elapsed from my dad’s death, I was still living at home and partying with my friends quite often now, trying to drink my sorrows away, and putting time between the pain seem to heal my troubled soul. When you lose your best friend and dad in one year you soon find yourself with an enormous guilt of “what if’s and what ifs.” Then try to find the answer in a bottle of cheap whiskey and reliving the same problem again the very next day. This carelessly went on for several years if not decades. 

          I got up one morning and grabbed my shotgun and headed out to a secluded spot in the woods where I found a couple of days prior where several squirrels were cutting on some hickory trees, and you could get your limit in one hour easily. The fox squirrels generally rose late in the mornings and usually late in the evenings but gray squirrels only came out in the early mornings most of the time. I shot three squirrels that morning and it was near noon before I decided to call it a day with my limit, yes, I was short of the 6 allowed daily limit but I wasn’t a greedy hunter.