Just One Thing

A Story by PlotBunny

I don't think I can say much without spoiling the whole story, but it's about a boy, a counselor, and an incompetent father.

“If you could ask your father to do just one thing, and he’d absolutely do it, what would it be?”

The young boy turned his large innocent eyes up at her, tearing them from his small, pale hands for the first time since he’d sat down. As a counselor, Melissa saw kids like this all the time. Sometimes they were neglected; sometimes they were abused and unwanted. This boy’s teachers firmly believed that he was one of the latter. He was a ten year old boy with no mother and a father that never showed up to any of the parent teacher conferences, but was always seen at the bar downtown, spending hundreds of dollars a week on alcohol.

This was her third session with the boy, and this was the only time he’d ever

looked up at her. He’d ignored all the questions asking him about himself, about his home, about his mother. But this question, about his father, caught his attention and drug his gaze up to hers. She had to struggle to keep her gaze calm as the black eye flashed in the light, the busted lip glistening with blood.

He says slowly, his eyes cautious, “Anything?”

Melissa nods, a smile being forced to her lips. She imagined all of the things he would say. ‘That he’d stop hitting me.’ ‘That he’d actually feed me.’ ‘That he’d love me.’

But what the boy said shocked her into a wide-eyed stare, and when he asked to be excused, she was only barely able to let him leave, her mind whirling with inner turmoil and confusion. Why would such a young boy ask such a thing? She’d have to ask him tomorrow, when he came back to school. Ask him where he got such humanity.

But he didn’t come back. She didn’t get her chance to ask him. She didn’t get her chance to help him. And when she attended his funeral, she noticed that his father wasn’t there, and she felt tears well in her eyes for the child she had been too late to help. And as she broke down into tears, she recalled what the boy had said, with a large, happy grin on his face.

“I’d ask him to be happy.”

© 2014 PlotBunny

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Mila

This was absolutely lovely and it tugged at my heartstrings, it really did! You have a rare talent of really using words to convey emotion and, if I would suggest anything, I would be to tap into that talent more and experiment the many different ways you can use it to convey a feeling. With this particular work, you did a great job of that, so well done! :)