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“You’ve killed me, you know that.” A week before his death my son was pale as the hospital sheets he sweated and shivered beneath. A gray beanie covered his chemo-bald head, and he spoke to my wife and me with a tired hatred we learned to expect. “How many times did you see me smoke? Over the last fifteen years. Hundreds? Thousands? Why didn’t you stop me? How many times did we share a cigarette?” Then he fell into a violent coughing spell.
“Please don’t say those things.” My wife, walking on eggshells, left the visitor’s chair and approached our son with a tiny pink plastic water cup. He knocked it from her hands and, between coughs, whispered a nasty word.
“Enoch!” I stood.
“He doesn’t mean it.”
“He does!”
“I do! Agh agh.”
Toward the end, my son’s doctors prescribed medication to help treat the terror. So far as I could tell, though, the drugs just made him languid, perhaps even more morose, and a smoother spigot from which venom spewed.
“I hope you die soon.” This our son said to us three evenings before his death. Enoch lay back and stared at the ceiling, as though speaking to something higher. “I hope when I die I become a ghost and infect your bodies with cancer. I’ll go inside you and ruin you somehow. If not with cancer then with something else. If a ghost can do that, that’s what I’m going to do. No one should bury their son. You don’t deserve to live after this. You failed.”
My wife was practically shaking in her chair. Aquake with compressed energy, rage, which she swallowed, and with a measured voice said, “You’re not making this very easy for us, Enoch.”
“I’m not making it easy?” He could not scream, though he wanted to. “I’m sorry this is so hard for you. It’s very difficult, I’m sure, for you. You killed me. You should be begging for forgiveness the way you let me destroy myself.”
“You knew the risks.”
“So I deserve this?”
“No, no, I didn’t say that.”
I tried to cut in, but my son quickly said, “You should burn in hell for what you’ve done.”
“Don’t you…”
My wife abandoned the thought. She tore from the room and raced down the cancer ward. I don’t know where she went. Because when I stood to follow, my son, speaking louder than I knew he could, cried, “Don’t go, Dad, please. Don’t go. I can’t be alone. Please don’t leave me alone. I’m sorry, I promise I’ll be good. I promise. Stay here until I fall asleep, please. I can’t be alone.”
Holding his frozen hand I said, “I’ll stay until you fall asleep,” which seemed to calm him. I let go and returned to the visitor’s chair.
We didn’t speak for a few minutes. But in that silence some desperate darkness clouded Enoch once again. With his eyes closed he said weakly, “You’re a monster, a murderer. You know that. That’s what you are. Killed your own son.” And he said that, and things like that, for twenty minutes or so until, mercifully, he fell asleep.
Whatever preparation life provides for death, my son, at twenty-eight years of age, certainly did not receive. He was clueless. Anyone could see it. So that night, hoping to hasten things, I said a prayer which will forever stay a secret between my maker and me. “Please let my son die,” I prayed silently. “We can’t take this pain anymore. Me, my wife, him. I think it would be better if you moved everything along.”
Since Enoch’s death, my faith has only gotten stronger, or maybe just more desperate. Now, in the evenings, after I clean my single plate and enter an empty bed, I pray. Sometimes to God, sometimes to Enoch. A prayer for forgiveness, for understanding. The phrase, “I’m not a murderer, I’m just so tired,” always returns. Again and again that phrase. Like a mantra. And I hold that prayer in my head, on repeat, lying in bed, while I smoke two packs before turning in.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Adam Kaz is a Chicago-based writer, editor, and marketing professional. He is the Editor in Chief of The Ground Is Uneven, a literary journal. His fiction, reviews, articles, and humor have appeared in Fabula Argentea, Literally stories, Third Coast Review, Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Machine, The Ground Is Uneven, and Digital Huddle.
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “You Must Die”:
This is what excellent flash fiction is all about. In a little under 700 words, author Adam Kaz smacks us in the face with an opening line that merges into an incredibly strong opening paragraph. All we could say after that opening was “wow!” But he doesn’t stop there. He takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster ride after that. And the father’s prayer… Well, it speaks for itself. If that opening paragraph wasn’t enough to grab the reader’s attention, the equally strong closing one surely does.
We love every story we’ve published to date, but when unexpected stories like this one cross our desk, they validate everything we set out to do when we began publishing our magazine twelve years ago.
This is go good!