Young Hearts Run Free

Excerpt from Young Hearts Run Free by C. Rance Redman

ISBN 0615190413

Letter Of Acceptance

I was not perpetually striking my father’s head with my empty trumpet. Metaphorically I was casting blows of retribution to every day my soul burned defenselessly in an unrelenting world of clutched purses and veiled criticisms. I crushed the skull of pessimism shackling my ankles to an anchor inside the pit of eternal bastardization. I cut the throats of voices bellowing criminal euphemisms and nigger. With rage I exposed the brain of the rabid mongrel as some eyes in pale faces regarded me.

Here I belligerently wept in sorrow as I indirectly murdered the half of myself I rarely saw or controlled, but always carried its burden on my back. Here I stood to get the dead weight off I no longer mourned or played dirges in B-flat to. Here my core boiled in sobbing isolation with an invisible man I hated. Notwithstanding the possibility that he too hated me, I killed in self-defense as he strangled me with an umbilical cord of a stymied chance from birth.

Incredulously I struck in inexorable madness until a splash of blood spattered my cheek. He did not scream in agony or wrench in shock. With a single backward step with the flesh of his forehead butterflied open, he slid down the wall behind leaving a trailed smear from his coarse sliced scalp. The silver horn with chips of bone and blood on the dented bell gonged to the ground as I froze in disbelief.

Cautiously I closed the door and knelt to my father’s last breath whispering, “Forgive me” in my ear. Shocked, I quivered in insurmountable regret as I held back a welling lump in my esophagus. He looked directly in my eyes when his pupils drew inward and neck went limp. His corpse fell to the side like a jack-in-the-box, as rivers of still warm blood oozed down his cranium.

Not flinching, I sat in sorrow. Time was our foe and it won. I never got to say to him, “I forgive you”. I never got to say, “I need you”. Slipping my palm down the lids of his eyes, I held my father for the first and last time as he lay with the peace of lifeless still.

Spent, I looked at his face for the first time with the wonder of a newborn seeing resemblance of myself. I had his distinguished nose and lips. Our irises were the same shade of auburn. We had the same birthmark on our necks.

Rage filled my heart again. I walked to a fading mirror attached to the his-and-her sinks, scratching my face as if I were trying to rip it off. I grabbed a pair scissors on the end of the counter and began to cut; I cut his thick eyebrows from my face; I cut his curled lashes. I cut off the dead weight of myself I always hated, but did not see until this day.

In solitude, baptized in my father’s gore I reached for the envelope under his right index. Peeling out the greeting card immersed in blood and folded at its midpoint, I opened it and recited its passages. In bold letters printed to the left there was, “HAPPY GRADUATION!” and to the right in hand written script, “Run free young Heart. Run free”. I have been running ever since.