Land of the Father
Land of the Father was the first short story I wrote in 2020. The first draft came easily and felt like a new direction that hadn’t been explored before. It’s a piece I’ve returned to often to redraft and refine.
Perhaps this is one of those stories that’ll never truly be completed, but it’s taught me the importance of revisiting your work to improve and critique it. Even years later.
The following is the first page of the story with recent edits.
He often drove with his hands off the wheel. An invitation for the pickup to drift from its lane into the oncoming headlights of the eighteen-wheelers that soared along the open desert highways. He lifted his hands with the approach of each truck. Closed his eyes. Waited for the impact. But the impact never came. The thunder of the trucks always rolled past the pickup’s cab, their taillights streaming into the void of night like comets receding in the rearview mirror.
It’d been weeks since he’d left home and struck out on the road, abruptly departing his life in the middle of an unremarkable day on a suburban street. The decision had been clear. Time to move on from what had once been so familiar. The comfort of the lounge in the evening hours. The tender outline of his wife’s face. The scent of lilac in the yard. The home had been a sanctuary. But since his return he’d seen it as something else. An artificial version of what the world really was. The violence he’d encountered had returned with him to the pristine space and made its home within the walls. It’d soured the air, stained the surfaces with the thick colors of viscera, and distorted the faces of his wife and baby son.
He’d been sure to pick a time where there’d be no risk of his family returning. His wife had headed on her weekly trip to the store to restock groceries. The baby rode shotgun. The errand was long enough to allow him to reach the interstate before they returned and safely put miles between himself and the moment his wife would realize he wasn’t coming back.
He hadn’t thought of much else besides how far he could get with the time available. Hadn’t thought of the repercussions of his decision. Hadn’t thought about the faces of his wife and son. Even now, far enough away, he still couldn’t bring himself to look at the creased photograph wedged between the few remaining bills he carried in his jacket pocket.
After a week of driving the station wagon he’d traded the vehicle for the old pickup. A deal made at a state line rest stop with a man who asked no questions and even spared some extra cash to go along with the trade. The pickup’s weathered color and rusted body looked like shit compared to the station wagon’s polished paintwork and gleaming wood panels. It’s what he’d wanted. A beat-up machine with a reliable engine. Something heavy duty that could roar down the highways and scent the air with burning oil. There was comfort in the deafening sound of the revving pistons and the mechanical odors that shrouded him on his course.
Breakfast was the only semblance of routine he kept to. Two boiled eggs. Two slices of buttered toast. A glass of fresh grapefruit juice. A cup of black coffee. He favored this meal in quiet diners, savoring the calm and dusty grace of elderly waitresses that doted on him like loving aunts.
He kept to the backroads as much as possible, though he thought it doubtful anyone would look for him this far from home. The small roads had taken him through countless forgotten towns. Across landscapes dotted with faded billboards advertising once famous roadside attractions. Each now shuttered. He passed the shells of these structures without stopping, seeing only children in the wreckage with beaded bracelets and woven blankets for sale. The sight of the children amid the stripped buildings haunted him long after passing. The towns were no better. Each a procession of boarded storefronts, empty streets, and aging inhabitants. Once vibrant burgs where the color of life had been drained, replaced by a thick atmosphere of oxidized metal and dust that invaded the pickup’s cab and left a ghost of each town across the interior in a thin film. Each night he wiped the residue from the surfaces with a strip of torn fabric that got dirtier the further he drove. A soiled memory recording the passage of time.