True Love of Coffee

This started as a poetry piece that quickly developed into a larger creative story this afternoon. It is a character development item for a story I am working on, and some readers have said it is somewhat disturbing. In any case, rip it apart.

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Christopher Adams

It was a quiet autumn day. Birds were singing in the distance, the trees whistled gently in the breeze, and the sun gently hid behind crimson clouds floating in the sky. The laughter of children could be heard nearby as they played on the shore of the lake skipping rocks off the calm serenity of the water, beckoning the geese to flutter from place to place. It was perfect. A calm peaceful day.

The clap of thunder sounded once without a sign of storm clouds above. Then again and again. The children’s laughter turned into frantic screaming of nightmarish intensity and I swore the balance of nature itself froze for a moment, then came crashing down in the opposite direction. The thunder came closer and closer, then stopped. The sky turned gray, the trees froze in place, and there was nothing but horrifying silence.

I stood at the water’s edge gazing out to lake and saw a lone man standing ankle deep in the water, he was wearing a fine gray business suit and holding a pistol down at his side. His body shifted as he viewed the nearby park, and my inquisitive nature was shocked to view what he was looking at. His work, the chaotic dream of urban security being shattered by a lunatic with a gun. Around him were the bodies of too many to count. They all seemed lifeless from where I was. Yet one small boy struggled with his own mortality and drew the painful attention of the man who would soon be known as Christopher Adams.

I screamed at the man from two hundred yards as he calmly walked towards the boy of only eight or nine years. I could barely hear the boy’s frantic cry for help as Christopher approached. My voice carried clear and far enough to reach the other shore, but the man who held the gun simply looked at me and smiled. I begged him to stop, I begged someone to help, but today my role could only be that of a witness.

Christopher Adams raised his arm, loaded a single round into his gun, aimed the pistol at the boy and gazed over his shoulder into my eyes. He grinned, and at that exact moment in time I looked into the eyes of someone that defied my belief. I saw what true evil was as the cry of the boy’s last moments were engulfed in the sound of deafening reality.

He turned towards me and I swore his laughter carried across the water as if the devil had found a home here on earth. He pulled one last bullet from his pocket, loaded it into his pistol, and ended his own life.

That would be the tale of a story I would never forget. It would lead to a name the news agencies would make me regret I had ever heard. Christopher Adams. That name would be remembered in the history of this city like a child’s nightmare story. It would find a home in the heart, born from a terror and fear that everyone could relate to, but a terror and fear that only I would have looked into.

As an old man I would dare remember the eyes I stared into that day and they would define the opposite in life I would fight against with all my strength. I would learn to question the world, the frailty of childlike hope, and the safety of my own thoughts would become a commodity that was more precious than anything else I would ever know.

Yet Christopher Adams would not be the name that would burn itself into my memory.

Instead of only remembering the name of a human devil I would instead choose to covet the name Brett Donnely, the name of the small boy I was helpless to save that warm autumn day. His name would inspire each day I helped another soul, his name would be the one I held in regard, and his name would give hope to the thousands of souls that I had the opportunity to touch in my life using the wisdom his life gave me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Creative Writing, Regret, Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.