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I started a Don Flack, Sr.-centric fic a few weeks ago, but it stalled very quickly, and so I left it to finish Part XVI of Sprache and the related Calliope interstitial. Then, last night, while I was relaxing into sleep, I realized why it wasn't getting anywhere. The perspective was right, but the setting was wrong, wrong, wrong--contrived and unwieldy. If I wanted the story to survive, I had to junk my original setting and start anew. So, I have, and perhaps now the story can find its wings.
For posterity, however, here is the original opening scene:
Donald Flack, Sr. can lay no claim to the title of Father of the Year; the proof on his neglect and pig-headed mistakes can be found in the empty spaces where one of his children should be, but he had been a cop for thirty-two years, and a damn good one, and the instincts that helped him collar dirtbags and wrench the truth from the lips of unrepentant, inveterate liars tell him that something has changed between his son and his wife. It's in the way he looks at her as she sits in the shade of an enormous oak with a book open on her queerly-slanting lap, one white, spidery hand squatting over the pages to keep them from turning in the light autumn breeze that hurries leaves across the grass. In the way he scoops up Junior and clutches him tightly to his chest, so tightly that the baby's squeals of delight threaten to sour into whimpers of discomfort. In the way his sharp blue eyes drink in every detail, chase the leaves and his little boy's toddling legs as he waddles cheerfully past and the twitch of Rebecca's skirt in the breeze. It as though he expects everything to dry up and blow away, dust caught in God's scouring wind, and leave him with nothing but handfuls of sand. It's naked desperation, and to see it on his son's face now twists his guts, because the last time Donnie had worn that expression, he'd been sixteen and heartbroken and trying to tell him that his baby girl was dead at the bottom of the stairs.
Pop, it's Diana,, a teenage Donnie croaks inside his head as he presides over the squat, three-legged grill with a spatula, and he's quick to drown that particular ghost with a long swallow of beer from the bottle clutched in one hands. That ghost poisons everything, salt strewn over the earth.
He lowers the bottle and flips a sizzling brat without looking. Donnie is playing with Junior, chasing him in a wide circle in the patch of parked the family has claimed for its last barbecue. His arms stretch toward his gleefully-shrieking son as he flees like the world's smallest perp, and his legs move with the loping unconscious grace that his aging legs can only envy, but his eyes are on his wife, on her golden hair and the flow of her skirt over her skinny, uncomely legs and the incongruously long shadow she casts over the grass. Look at me, his eyes plead as the rest of him remembers his fatherly duty and follows his squealing boy's flight. Look at me. Adoration, oh, yes, so much of it that his chest aches in sympathy, but there is also anguish, deep and clear and swollen as a bruise, and a hint of fear, the flash of sunlight on a polished blade.
For posterity, however, here is the original opening scene:
Donald Flack, Sr. can lay no claim to the title of Father of the Year; the proof on his neglect and pig-headed mistakes can be found in the empty spaces where one of his children should be, but he had been a cop for thirty-two years, and a damn good one, and the instincts that helped him collar dirtbags and wrench the truth from the lips of unrepentant, inveterate liars tell him that something has changed between his son and his wife. It's in the way he looks at her as she sits in the shade of an enormous oak with a book open on her queerly-slanting lap, one white, spidery hand squatting over the pages to keep them from turning in the light autumn breeze that hurries leaves across the grass. In the way he scoops up Junior and clutches him tightly to his chest, so tightly that the baby's squeals of delight threaten to sour into whimpers of discomfort. In the way his sharp blue eyes drink in every detail, chase the leaves and his little boy's toddling legs as he waddles cheerfully past and the twitch of Rebecca's skirt in the breeze. It as though he expects everything to dry up and blow away, dust caught in God's scouring wind, and leave him with nothing but handfuls of sand. It's naked desperation, and to see it on his son's face now twists his guts, because the last time Donnie had worn that expression, he'd been sixteen and heartbroken and trying to tell him that his baby girl was dead at the bottom of the stairs.
Pop, it's Diana,, a teenage Donnie croaks inside his head as he presides over the squat, three-legged grill with a spatula, and he's quick to drown that particular ghost with a long swallow of beer from the bottle clutched in one hands. That ghost poisons everything, salt strewn over the earth.
He lowers the bottle and flips a sizzling brat without looking. Donnie is playing with Junior, chasing him in a wide circle in the patch of parked the family has claimed for its last barbecue. His arms stretch toward his gleefully-shrieking son as he flees like the world's smallest perp, and his legs move with the loping unconscious grace that his aging legs can only envy, but his eyes are on his wife, on her golden hair and the flow of her skirt over her skinny, uncomely legs and the incongruously long shadow she casts over the grass. Look at me, his eyes plead as the rest of him remembers his fatherly duty and follows his squealing boy's flight. Look at me. Adoration, oh, yes, so much of it that his chest aches in sympathy, but there is also anguish, deep and clear and swollen as a bruise, and a hint of fear, the flash of sunlight on a polished blade.
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