Pensées d’un Père

A short exercise in utilizing T.S. Eliot's objective correlative.

       The bus driver opened the door, waited a minute or two, and finally called out, asking if I would be boarding or not. I told him to go ahead and I would take the next one. There must be some sort of policy for how to treat men just sitting at bus stops because the next three did exactly the same. Somewhere in the interval between the second and third, I got lost in the detail of the paved road. At first the rain had made it look sleek and soft, yet as I continued to look I began to notice just how unforgivingly rough it was. I realized that, no matter how much rain fell, if I rubbed my hand too swiftly with enough pressure, the road before me would show no mercy and I would bleed.

                I was briefly drawn out of my head by the third bus arriving and going through all the same formalities before once again heading on its way. This bus I watched depart and saw in one of the windows a small child who looked to be about the age when a baby begins to learn to walk. I remember the few joyous weeks when my own son made his first successful attempts at walking. My wife and I were so happy at how quickly he was learning, but then he began to wander.

There was one night that I was reading in my bedroom and I heard a loud shrieking coming from somewhere within the house. It took a few minutes for the sound to register and for me to find my son. He was on the ground in the kitchen, sobbing his eyes out. He must have made his way all the way down the stairs just to be tripped up by the tile floor. I put a bandage on his scraped-up knees, comforted him, and soon it was as if nothing had happened. But Jesus Christ, that house was too big. If we had just moved to something smaller, maybe one of those ranch-style houses in a quiet suburb, my wife and I would have been able to keep a closer eye on him and maybe he would have never scratched up his little knees.

                By the time the fourth bus had come and gone, and the fifth bus was arriving, I had constructed an entirely new life for my son in which all harm was prevented, based on the idea that it would all have been possible had I only been a more vigilant father. Yet this construct of a new life faded just as quickly as it had been built and I decided that I had let enough buses pass. The doors opened, I walked up the stairs, paid my fifty cents, and the bus went on its way.

Reviews

[Boranus]

good clear writing. easy to read and follow. you have a natural knack and tact for writing and navigating through a story. I as a reader found your narrative voice warm and friendly. But more importantly what held my attention is flowing ease of the sentences. cogent and coherent.