The Things They Do In The Dark

One

His dad was dead.

Joe knew it would happen eventually. People die all the time, it's just how life goes and a good portion of those people were fathers. Even more so, his dad had been sick for a really long time. Longer than one night expect. He put up a good fight.

A damn good fight.

But that didn't soften the blow. Even with the blow looming over them, it didn't make the eventual death any easier. Nothing would make it easier. Death wasn't easy, but then again, neither was life.

It was just him and his mom now. They had the funeral and scattered his ashes in his favorite places. They kept a bit of it. In an old fashioned urn that his mom kept close to her and inside a special piece that Joe's uncle had made for him. It was a tiny silver pendent in the shape of a baseball that Joe wore around his neck.

He wore it every day since it had been given to him. He kept it close, beneath his shirt, taking it off only for showers and sometimes bed.

They said goodbye to friends and sold their house and made their way to England. They didn't have a choice. They lived modestly, with his parents making careers out of being small town dance instructors. Joe was still in school. Young and eager. They waited for him to graduate, using up the last bit of the money they had saved before it was time to go.

The medical bills were paid off and Joe gave up his college fund in order for them to find a place close enough to his aunt and uncle in England. He had never been there before, though he always mentioned wanting to visit.

Now he lived there, leaving his life in American behind him. All he had left were memories and a tiny sprinkle of his fathers ashes.

They got an apartment. Or a flat, as they called it. It was small, but affordable. His mother got another job teaching dance, though she didn't have the same spark about it. Even when his dad was dying, he would still try to bust a move or encourage her to do so.

Now she was doing it for the sake of supporting herself and her son.

Joe got a job too, wanting to help out and not be such a burden. Truth was, he hated it. Hated where he worked, where he lived. Hated how the weather in England couldn't decide if it wanted to be wet or dry. Hated that they had to pack up everything and move across the world because his mom couldn't handle this on her own.

He didn't hate his mom. He understood her pain. Her best friend and partner was gone after months of watching him suffer. She needed her family. He just wished he could have been enough and they could have stayed behind. Even if they had to give up their home, they could have found someplace in town.

They could have kept a sense of normalcy, but it just wasn't an option.

It was two months in when his aunt surprised him. There was a smaller university close enough to town and they were going to pay his way. He dreamed of going to school for film, but now he'd take simple liberal arts classes to get his associates degree or whatever the British equivalent was.

He guessed they had sensed his all around destain for what was happening to his life and thought this might cheer him up. It did, to a degree. It allowed him to get out more. He went to work as a stock boy at an old fashioned book store that (somehow) was still in business and then he hung around his flat.

He had no friends. No life. No future. He was as dead on the inside as his father was in general.

School wasn't terrible. He got used to being the oddity. People staring at the random and strange American that roamed the halls. He went to class and got good grades. He interacted with a few people, but didn't make friends.