Generations

Winner---8/1/08

ID: 896794   (Rated: 13+) Daily Flash Fiction Challenge  Enter your story of 300 words or less. Note new starting time! by arakun the twisted raccoon

         The dream always started the same way.  Matt was in a place he didn’t recognize and Will was with him.  Suddenly Will darted away and called out. “Catch me, Dad.”  It was a game they played when Will was little, but now, years later, Matt could not run after him.  “Stop, wait,” he said.  “I can’t run like I used to.”  He followed the laughing child until he tripped over something. 

         He tripped over Will lying in the path.  But it wasn’t little Will any more.  It was the grown up son who had gone off to the war last spring.  Matt lifted him and pulled him close.

         And then his arms were cradling a stiff, unresponsive weight, a corpse.  He looked again at the face.  It was becoming a skull.

         The sound of his own scream woke him.  He was bathed in sweat, his face wet with tears. 

         He sat up, shaking.

         Ann asked, “Another bad dream?”

         Matt said, “Yeah.”  He couldn’t tell her about this dream; a dream that could so easily come true with Will in that place.

         He went into the bathroom and stood looking into the mirror at his reflection.  He remembered leaving home when he was Will’s age. But that was to college, not to war.  That morning he had taken a new look at his parents, like seeing them for the first time.  His father’s hair was turning gray.    Now the man in the mirror had gray hair.  It had all gone by in a fast tumbling of years. Now he was the father waiting for a son to come home.  He whispered, “Father God, let us have him back!”
         
         279 words