The Sacrifice

Sun rays shot through the blinds of the old study like laser beams. Dust particles appeared, danced briefly across the rays and then disappeared again forever. Books and newspaper articles were stacked haphazardly on bookshelves all around the room. Some all the way to the ceiling. On the walls were white boards with names and dates and mathematical equations. Where the white board ran out someone had started writing on the wall and where there wasn't writing there were newspaper clippings and drawings pinned into the old wood paneling from another era. Intense research had obviously been done here. Though without the bookshelves, books and newspapers the room was actually quite sparse. The only other furniture was a cracked brown leather office chair and a small table that held a desk lamp and a thirty-year-old laptop dating back to the early two-thousands. The letters on it's keys were faded. The J was completely worn off as were a few other letters. Under the desk was a couple of dozen empty bottles of Jack Daniels. Charlie and his mother Madeline stood amongst it all.

He looked around, it had been twenty years since he had been here, but not much had changed since he was a boy. Even though his father had passed away months ago, he felt that same twisted knot right below his heart that he got when his father was in the room. He could close his eyes and open them and see him again, ready to yell at him for being in here. Charlie drew in a deep breath. "Why are we here mom?"

His mother looked at him with eyes filled with deep regrets. "I read it, Charlie."

"Was it worth it?" he asked. "Was all of this worth it?" He waved his arms in the air toward the clippings that decorated the walls.

Charlie's mother's frown deepened, "He loved you, Charlie. I know you think he didn't, because he wasn't much of a father. But he loved you. He could never bring himself to leave us, at the same time he couldn't bare to be a father either. Never thought he was good enough. That it was better he spent his time here, working on the project God called him to. It's not his fault the way things turned out. He couldn't help it."

"Bull. You can't make excuses for him mom. He could have been a father to me anytime he wanted to. Instead, he spent his life here. All he cared about was drinking and sitting in this room working on his holy project. I'm glad he's dead."

Charlie's mother hauled off and smacked him across the cheek. "Don't you dare talk about him like that. You don't know what happened to him. What he went through."

Charlie stared at his mother Madeline and rubbed his cheek. In his entire thirty-five years on earth, he couldn't remember her ever smacking him.

Madeline wiped tears from her eyes, pulled a flash drive out of her pocket and put it in Charlie's hand. "This has the answers you're looking for. Read it if you want, or just keep hating your father. I don't care."

Charlie looked away, rubbed his thumb back and forth across the object's edge. Feeling the contours. He flipped it between his fingers, looked across his father's old study where the thirty-year-old laptop set next to a green banker's lamp that writers always used in old movies.

"This is his life's work, isn't it mom? His masterpiece?" Charlie asked. He thought of smashing it without ever looking at it. It would have been justice, but he couldn't do it. Something inside him held him back.

His mother nodded and motioned toward the old laptop. Charlie stared at the drive in his hand now. The smell of his father's old leather chair and stale snack mix still hung in the room even though he had been dead for months. It was like his dad was still there and Charlie was a little boy again.

"Dad, want to play catch?" eight-year-old Charlie asked.

"Charlie, I told you I have work to do. Get out of here, you can't be in here!" his father yelled from the leather chair without turning to face his son. The cracks and fades not yet visible on its surface.