Fallen King: A Fallen Men Short Story by Darling Giana

Author:Darling, Giana [Darling, Giana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giana Darling Publishing
Published: 2021-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

King

Comin’ home.

So many books had been written about the act of returnin’, and I’d read them all. There wasn’t much to do in Alaska durin’ the winter months but fuck my gorgeous, pregnant wife and lay tangled together under the warm blankets readin’.

Yet as I stood on the threshold of my dad’s cabin outside Whistler listenin’ to the cacophony of familiar chaos within, I felt at a total loss.

How did one return from death?

There was no road map or bible for such a thing. I knew ’cause I’d googled it like a fuckin’ idiot. Cress caught me, but she hadn’t laughed ’cause my woman knew me inside and out. She knew how wrong self-doubt felt around my shoulders, an ill-fittin’ shirt. I kept pickin’ at it, adjustin’ it, wishing it would feel right when I knew it never would.

The problem wasn’t in the physical act of comin’ home.

I’d done it in a rented cage over the long, black frosted roads of wintry Alaska into equally wintry British Columbia, from one country to the other without any shift in the landscape. I’d done it with Elvis through the speakers, and Cress in the passenger seat pushed way back to accommodate her pregnant body. She read Paradise Lost to me from my high school copy, the pages warped from the press of fingers and the touch of a pen in nearly every margin.

It hadn’t helped to soothe me, not really.

’Cause I could come home easy as I pleased.

But that didn’t mean I’d be welcomed .

And wasn’t that the fuckin’ crux of it?

Knew Dad would cry ’cause he was known as a monster, but at his heart, he was all fuckin’ man, as human and in tune with it as they came. There’d be no grudge held, no anger or bitterness held over for weeks to come. The second my old man laid eyes on me, my death was over—not forgotten but overcome. He was a man of the future, not the past, and over the months of my isolation, I’d come to understand why he was like that.

When you’d lived through the worst of it, the only thing that’ll get you up in the mornin’ is the thought that maybe tomorrow will be better, just a little bit brighter.

H.R. too.

Not ’cause it was in her nature to forgive but ’cause we were a pair. It was a natural, irrevocable bond that couldn’t be shaken by anythin’, not even death. When you grow up with a toxic mother and an unfortunately absent father, you fuse. You become each other’s parent and guardian, protector and confidante. We were siblings and the deepest of friends.

But the rest…

My brothers in leather and motor oil, the men I’d chosen who meant more to me than most of my blood relations ever had.

I wasn’t sure how they’d react, and for the first time in my entire fuckin’ life, I was terrified of what other people would think.

“Honey,” my wife’s sweet voice poured through my ears and dispersed my dark thoughts.

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