Light from Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker

Author:Shawn Smucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction;Christian fiction;Suspense fiction;FIC042000;FIC066000
ISBN: 9781493417735
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

thirty-two

The Sleeping Father

When Cohen crept upstairs after dark, bruised and aching from the Beast, he found his father asleep on the sofa. There were cans on the window ledge above the couch and a lone glass tumbler on the coffee table with a thin golden skin coating the inside. Cohen limped over and picked it up, hobbled to the kitchen sink, and turned it upside down. Only a few drops fell out, but it gave him a certain satisfaction, emptying the glass before his father could. He moved to put it down, but he was distracted, still trembling, and his hand hit the faucet, knocking the glass into the sink where it shattered with a sound that split the air.

His father moaned from the sofa. Cleaning up the glass was the last thing Cohen felt like doing, but he thought if his father came into the kitchen in the state he was in, he might very well slice himself open. So he carefully pushed the shards into the corner of the sink with a towel, bunched everything together, and threw it in the trash, towel and all.

The air in the apartment was cold and thin, like the atmosphere at the top of a mountain. Light shone through the windows, pale and anemic. He wondered if his father had turned the thermostat down again. He was always complaining that he was hot while Cohen walked the house in layers, trying to stay warm.

Cohen went to the bathroom and cleaned himself up, washing his face with icy water, putting a bandage on his hand, and swishing the blood out of his mouth. He reached gingerly inside and felt the tooth, one of his molars. It wiggled. He groaned. It would have to come out. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and leaned against the wall. He reached in and pulled on the tooth. Once. Twice. Again. Finally it made a grinding scrape and he felt a snap as it gave way. The pain made his vision cloud over.

The hole in his gum where the tooth used to be oozed blood, and he kept spitting it into the sink, gargling water, spitting, gargling. Trying not to choke. He remembered the baseball he’d taken to the nose when he was young, that old familiar taste of blood. When the bleeding slowed, he crammed some paper towels into the back corner of his mouth and cleaned the sink and the mirror and turned out the light. He was so tired.

He walked over to the sofa where his father still slept and nudged his shoulder with one hand. “Dad,” he said, his voice muffled by the paper towel still in his mouth.

Nothing.

“Dad,” he said louder, shaking harder, but his father didn’t respond. He was far away at the end of a dark tunnel, at the bottom of a well, out of reach. Cohen clenched his jaw and rubbed his cheek, feeling where the tooth used to be. He walked over to the wall opposite the sofa, sat down, and waited.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.