Father

Image "Dining Room" by kidy-kat over at Deviantart

Every evening, Father insisted that they eat dinner together. Money had always been in Father's family, and each child had known, for generations, that he or she did not have a good father. Father was determined to break that tradition, so each evening they ate dinner as a family. Unfortunately Father did not have an example of what a good father looked like, so the attention he gave his children was forced and superficial. But it was attention, and his children grew up knowing that they had a mediocre father who tried. Father wanted them to make something of themselves, so that inheriting the family estate and managing it would not be a prize which would fall to one child and drown the rest or be split among the children and ruin all of them by the lack of worth in a split estate.

The oldest, Grace, made sure that her brothers and sisters appreciated Father, but the youngest, Adam, was his favorite. Everyone, even Mother, was a bit jealous of Adam because Father's love for him was genuine. It wasn't just something Father felt that he should do, it was something he wanted to do. In his middle and old age Father had mellowed, and that helped with the youngest, but it helped more that Adam was just like mother, except his assertiveness, and his magical talent, and his maleness, and a couple of other features that Father liked better about himself than mother. But Adam had her eyes and her soft way of looking at things, and her skill at love. 

Grace sat to the left of father. She was tall, nearly six feet, with very dark brown hair that looked black from most angles, a slight figure that everyone assured her would fill out once she had her first child, and deep green eyes. Talented in the fiery part of the thermoarts, Grace had an even softer nature than mother, which was against the grain, and impeded her progress. With so much talent, she would make a good generator worker, and with the heighth and frightening presence of mind to deal with insubordination, maybe she would make a manager or leader in the generator company. Father made sure she had the training she needed, but her quiet, kind nature meant she would not be groundbreaking, and so he did not give her much extra or encourage her beyond the guilty compulsion he felt for all his children. She knew Father tried, and she resolved to be a better parent than him. She was successful not just at that, but in buisness and the thermoarts, and would prove most "successful" of the children, and father would be proud of her, and regret his mistakes.

The second child, Tom, a bit of a small boy with bags under his eyes and long hair that wouldn't stay out of his eyes, sat in the middle of Father's left side, and was quite quick. Not smart or fast to run, Tom had skill in the magic of living a bit quicker. It didn't mean anything functionally for him on the job market, except that he wouldn't live as long, but no one found out (and no one knew, except for Father and Tom's tutor. Tom didn't know yet what was going on, but Father had figured it out, and Tom's tutor was paid to make Tom's ability stronger, and limit his use of it, without letting on that it was an ability or that Tom was special. Tom knew they weren't supposed to talk about their tutors, but nothing else.) Since no one knew, Tom's prospects would not be hurt, and he was quite good with numbers and not bad at figuring money. He would make a good cashier, but father was pushing him to become an accountant, which would make more money, but would also increase his liability for procrastination and hard burning. Avoiding that was one of the things the tutor was for, and Father pushed study skills with Tom more than with the other children. 

James was the third child, sat to Father's right, and was the second favorite, because he was so like Father. James was not as tall as could be expected for his age, but was a strong boy with deceptively sleepy grey eyes and messy black hair. James felt confused at Father encouraging Tom so much in academia. James was not the best at math, but he was a born scholar, and so all of the difficult and knowledge-driven arts were available to him. Since James was so prone to study, he had trouble socially and with relaxation. Father forced him to learn an instrument, to take cotillion, and to learn to speak publicly and recite poetry from memory. The poetry from memory kept him from rebelling, the speaking taught him things he needed to know about affecting people's emotions and how his own emotions and social graces should behave. Learning an instrument gave him an impressive outlet for his passion, which was good socially and for his happiness, to have something other than the knowledge and intellect based magic to focus his time on. James would be good at whatever he decided to do, but Father did his best to keep James from taking life too seriously, and, with time, James would stop resenting that and be happy for it. Though he would have no children of his own, James would be grateful for his father, who had tried so hard.

Across from father sat Mother. She was not gifted with magic as far as was obvious, except that her eyes would glow and her feet sometimes did not touch the ground (though they caught traction) and she was thoughtful and good at gift giving and kind words, and made every child's favorite desert and meal for their birthdays and sometimes more often, and did many other things that made her a wonderful matriarch, but would have been terribly helpless without a family, having very few marketable traits. She had found a man and created with him a family to love, and that made her successful, but Tom failed to realize that until Mother was gone, and only Jenna truly loved Mother for what she was. None of the children save Jenna realized what a gift their mother had been, and even Father had no love for her like he had for Adam, or as Father had for his childhood friend Samuel.

To mother's left sat Jenna. Jenna had a bit of magical talent, but she was young (ten) and her legs dangled from the table and they were not sure how far her telekinesis would stretch yet, but it did not look promising. For now she had to nearly touch things and though she could jump fairly high she was not gifted with flight yet. It was too early to judge, but she was already an excellent cook and weaver, and Tom teased her that if she did not learn to use her telekinesis, she would have to use it to stir soup. It was an insult, and Father glared at Tom for being so rude to mother (who Tom resented,) but Jenna loved Mother and Tom very much, and being a cook like mother was a compliment, as was the idea that someday her "moving magic" as she had called it when she was "little" would reach across the room and be deft enough to stir a pot. Perhaps her personality would mellow, but at this age, when she did realize she was being insulted, she had a quick temper and a sharp tongue. Certainly, she had spunk, which father encouraged and mother tried to smooth down into cleverness, but she was young and time would tell.

In the middle seat to Father's right sat Adam. He was too young for the honor of one of Father'a sides, and Mother, for all her love, could not bear to grow too attached to the one who was clearly Father's favorite. She grew attached to Jenna. They did everything together, and so Adam defaulted to Father for his love, which, while it was less apt, was from a source that seemed more powerful, worth more, having come from a parent gifted with alchemy instead of one gifted with maternal instincts. Adam was, as I have said, very like Mother, save for a few things that would make him more successful in a worldly way. His magical aptitude, though they could all do most things, and we have merely outlined their talents, had not been found for certain, but he had the signs of seership. Really the signs were just nightmares, and Adam would develop the kind aptitude for nurturing, which had not been fully explored in those days but was best for making things grow and healing without knowledge, and fixing emotional wounds and farming. He was strongly magical, and Father put him in the wrong kind of tutoring early on, hoping for that Seer in the family even after hope was gone, so that he and Adam were disappointed and cross with one-another through Adam's teenage years, because of an abundance of love between them. Later they would resolve their differences, but too quickly one of them would die, and the other would regret the lost time. 

There was one seat remaining, to Mother's right. Haden was a painter, and that was all. He did not appear to have any useful calling or worthwhile dreams, or anything to fall back on. Father ordered a myriad of teachers for him, but nothing struck his interest. Military history, tactics, statesmanship, management, numbers, literature, the trades, engineering...there was a very over saturated market for artists, and father did not think of training him for that until he was twelve and had failed to apply himself to anything else. Father did not want his children to be unhappy, so had continued buying paint supplies for the boy, and at twelve he decided that Haden was a lost cause, would never amount to anything important, and that the best he could do for his son was to buy him paints and lessons and let him do what he wanted. Haden was never successful, but he did not starve.

Every evening they ate a great dinner as a family, and father tried to be better than his father. Each of them that had families, each night, ate dinner with them, and, with a poor example, tried to make something of themselves, to be a better parent than their poor old man had been. When they inherited the estate, and Father and Mother were gone, there was no question. They gave it to Haden, who financed his life and painting with it, and they all created estates of their own, which, though smaller, they were proud of. Father looked down on them, and was proud.

"Father" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.