“I don’t know what happened, why her hand wasn’t in mine anymore. I tried to find her but…” he trails off, his voice cracking at the seams but he successfully finds the handle and steadies it.

He shakes his head.

“I couldn’t find her.  It was just too rough, too much panic and confusion, and the dawn light wasn’t good. There were many, many others too; the rescuers just couldn’t find them.  And they spent days searching.”

He falls silent eventually.  The boy waits for more, but nothing else issues.

Out over the sea, the perfectly-round luminous sun has dropped onto the horizon, rendering the world the deepest crimson and still and dreamlike. The boy stares, enthralled; even he pauses his faraway thoughts and pays some attention. They watch as the sun drops past the water line. 

“They are very strong. I don’t think the wind and rain would have stopped them,” the boy says finally, looking up into the sky.

He glances with some confusion at the boy. “Who?”

“The angels. Mum’s angel and the angels for all those other people.”

“Hmmmf.”

“Why do you keep saying that, daddy?!” The child turns to him with open bafflement and a touch of exasperation, and as their eyes meet, a flash of memory crosses his mind. He sees himself at home - at another time; a lifetime almost - his head bowed in prayer, his wife and son with him. He looks away across the sea shamefaced but not really caring either.

“They would have flown straight down and picked them up, then flown up again… to Heaven.” The child continues quietly.

A minute goes by.

“I should never have let go of her hand,” he whispers again.

The boy turns and stares at him for a while. Then turns and picks up the boned driftwood again and starts digging the sand beside him.  Refusing to look up, he mutters:  “That’s all you ever say!”

“Uh?!.”

“You never say anything but that! Ever since you came back.  Just now, you said some things, but I know when we go back to the house, you’ll just sit there and whisper that same thing over and over.”

The father stares - immobilised, tongue tied.

“You don’t piggyback me anymore. Or hold my hand. You don’t even call me by my name.” The white driftwood now turns into a full earth-drill flying up sand as one thrust becomes more pronounced than the last.

“I know you are very sad because mummy isn’t here. I am too, daddy.” The child’s little voice breaks so dangerously he almost loses it, but with visible willpower beyond his years, he steers it back on course. The driftwood drill, however, keeps its onslaught.

“She is gone and it’s like you are gone too! I see you but it’s like you are not there too! You just sit there …. I am waiting for you to call me but you don’t even call me!”

He notices his son sitting there, on the sand next to him, really notices him this time – his little frame, how his small shoulders have drooped, his bowed head, the little right hand clasping and driving the stick – and he realises the last time he looked at his son this way was some six months ago, when he and his wife were farewelling the boy and his grandmother at the Buka wharf before they boarded the ship for Rabaul. He realises the boy sitting next to him looks different from the child he farewelled; this one looks older and weary and very sorrowful. Suddenly, something akin to lightning or electricity shock cuts across the pit of his stomach and he feels a familiar tightening around his throat.

“Why don’t you call for me anymore, daddy?,” the driftwood takes its most violent plunge and stops erect  like a dead mini tree stump as the first sob escapes from the little body.

 He can’t take it anymore. The lightning has forked and re-forked by the hundreds inside of him, he feels his stomach filling and heaving with torrents of grief and remorse and sorrow, the flood pushing mightily against his already-constricted throat. His eyes burn with boiling tears.

“Oh, Joshua!”

He lunges for his little boy and crushes him to his chest as the first wave of violent sobs, guttural and from some hidden place beyond his stomach, slams over his body. The sobs come, wave upon tumultuous wave, ferocious and furious and uncontrollable. He lets himself to the mercy of his storm, allowing it to burst forth, rage forward, to roar freely. On and on the tempest rages, as he clings onto his little boy until, finally, the gale abates and, soaked and exhausted, they settle into a slow-rocking, hugging, sniffling cove.

He looks up at last, wipes his face, then his son’s. On the boy’s face, he lingers - touching this gently, wiping that softly as he peers into his only child’s visage.

“Josh.u.a.” He lets the name roll over his tongue, syllable by syllable, so deliberately that he feels another tide of emotion well up and his eyes blur again.

Through his tears, he picks up his son’s hand. The palm is purplish and the young skin tender from the violence of the digging. He holds it to the left side of his chest and, still searching the little face, feels his heart rise to his mouth. “I promise never ever to let this one go.” The tears drop and he lets them.

Then he turns his son around, sits him on his lap and draws him to his chest. They stare out over the blackening sea.

 “Do you think I have my own angel too?” he asks after a while.

“Yes. Mummy said everyone has their own angel. You have yours too.”

He looks up into the night sky, lost momentarily in a faraway thought.

“Do you think mummy is up there?”

“Yes, daddy.”

A pause, but only the smallest one this time.

“Thank you, Joshua.”

“For?”

“For giving me your hand.”

“What’s that mean, daddy?”

“Someday - when you’re older - I’ll explain it to you.”

Up in the sky, the stars burst forth, in unison and in such multitudes that it seemed someone had just sprinkled the sky with twinkling, sparkling dust for a show. He closes his eyes and inhales the salty sea air deep into his lungs.

 “It will be a bright, sunny day tomorrow; a good day,” he says.

Then he whispers into his son’s ear. “Are you hungry?”

Joshua nods.

“Then, time we went in.”

They get up and without another word, Adam hoists his son onto his back and piggybacks him up Kesa Beach toward home as the sea lay quiet and docile beside them.

___________

NOTES ABOUT THE STORY

I drew my main inspiration from the Rabaul Queen tragedy, dealing with an example of how survivors and their families would cope with the subsequent loss and grief;

I have the setting down as Kesa Beach, Buka Island some six months after the tragedy, although I tried not to reveal too much detail at once;

This technique I tried to apply throughout the short, in an effort to keep the story as suspenseful as possible, even using this to reveal gradually the relationship between the characters;

I hope I have developed the conflict enough between the two characters, and built up to a sufficient climax, and I hope the resolution is alright too;

I tried to keep the figures of speech (metaphors and analogies) around the themes of storms and the sea, also utilising the sunset setting as a symbolic way of mentioning death/new life;

The character names are deliberate: I chose Joshua for the son because of the meaning of the name (“God Saves”, in Aramaic) and Adam for the father because of the underlying theme  of  Faith and religion/Christianity;

The title is also deliberate: I was torn between Joshua’s Hand (as in God extends his hand of salvation in our moment of unbelief and unacceptance of the course of life) and Father of the Man (from William Wordsworth’s poem My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold, “the Child is the father of the Man…”).

Both have Christian themes. I eventually settled for Father of The Man, a symbolic way of saying that (a) even as adults, we still learn from our children and (b) God (Joshua) still remains the Father to us (Adam).

The dialogue, which came to me before anything else, is written in the present tense (the way it was formed in my head), and so I tried keeping the narrative within that verb form, although I think I might need some editing help with the various tenses within the narration.

I think I have gone over the word limit by a couple of hundred words; please do not penalise me;

Please, if possible, include this little line somewhere in the story, preferably at the end: “Dedicated to the memory of all those who perished on MV Rabaul Queen in February 2012.”

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to let off some writing steam; I have two more pieces but was too late to submit so I’ll do them for next year.

Ge Abolo (it’s a pen-name) comes from Siassi Island in the Morobe Province) has always been around story-telling people her whole life. Her mother and both grandfathers are gifted story-tellers, imparting to her the love of telling stories through their recitals of traditional legends and folklore at her young age.

Later when she started in school, she naturally gravitated toward books and has read almost everything from Charles Dickens to Nancy Drew. She says if the world was equal, she would have first headed down the writer’s path, although she has not completely ruled out that option. She still hopes to publish a book one day. She hopes readers find her first short story enjoyable.