"Your mother lied to you. That's the truth. You're not special, you're not one in a million." Her eyes never left the gun gripped in his shaking hand, as his finger twitched on the trigger.
"But that's OK hunny. It's OK to not be special, hell none of us are special and we all have to grind on through this life."
She nodded at him encouragingly as his face fell in a resigned grimace.
"I never thought I was special." His eyes glistened like two oysters in their shells. "I didn't, honestly."
"Yeah, but your mother told you that, right?"
"Well, yeah." Fingers stopped twitching but the gun remained steady, pushed up against his temple is if to force that pain back into the throbbing hypothalamus. Cold metal, cooling and reassuring, promising certainty.
"This is the problem, hunny. We are told from an early age that we are special, coddled in the expectation of greatness. Then when we realize that it's all a fucking hard grind, a struggle to achieve even mediocrity, we plummet like a stone." He stared at her, eyes like cauldrons of fire. "You've just hit the water at the bottom of the well. You can feel that sinking feeling. There's only one way to go now, it's time to swim! Break for the surface and breathe again, you can do it."
Slowly, his hand slipped downwards as the cauldron boiled over and tears flowed like lava from beneath flickering eyelashes.
*
It wasn't so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently. I saw it in this guys eyes, soft but desperate, pleading for reassurance, cold with the intelligence to know a lie for a lie. Everyone lies to their children sometimes, but I could tell he was close to the edge and a lie would simply send him careening out into those winds.
This was the time to tell the truth, I had learned that in my years on the force. In the chaos of a hurricane, you found the eye, that moment of tranquility where you could hear and the only option was the truth. In the eye of the storm anything else would catapult you out into the maelstrom.
*
The time Fred went to the car wash and never came back will haunt me for the rest of my life! What had I done to deserve this? My husband couldn't be a normal man. Couldn't be strong for me and the children. Why, this empty shell? Saying and doing all the things that were expected of him without ever asking why.
I would have preferred him to fight, argue, throw the kitchen crockery at me; anything other than the blank stare and mumbled apologies whenever we talked. What was his problem? Why had he done this? Driving off on a Sunday afternoon, 'to get the car washed' never to return. I called the police and nothing, I called the hospitals, nada. I even tracked down his tattered diary with his old friends telephone numbers. Nothing, except tears and silence.
*
She lifted the gun out of his limp hand as he folded up like a drowned spider. Sobs crashing from his lungs in painful spasms as he curled up in a fetal position on the cold gray pavement. She waited. Finally, after a long time he looked up at her.
"I just need to get away from all this." He waved his arms out as if to encompass the whole of eternity in that gesture. His eyes steady and calm.
The police officer nodded slowly and turned away.
The end
This post is in response to mariannewest weekend 3 prompt freewrite challenge which can be found here. The picture is from unsplash.com free to use. Image credit to the photographer, Jp Valery. Please follow link to verify.