Burn Barrel

By Sean Ryan

 

Doug Strange was standing out in a corn field with lots of dead stalks surrounding him. There was a bald spot near the center of the area which he’d made by pulling up the dead corn. He needed a place to burn his father’s diaries.

Bob Strange, his father, had been a diarist for more than fifty years and when he died, at the age of seventy-six, of a heart attack, he knew that nobody would want to read the diaries. They were boring. Dull even.

Doug did not want the dead pages with dead words, so, as he’d agreed with his father, before his untimely death, he would burn the approximately 50,000 pages of a lifetime of entries. “He color-coded everything,” said Doug to his wife, Julie.

“He was an organized guy. He really was.”

“My father was obsessive.” Doug bent over and picked up a stack of diaries, each in their own, colored folders, and set them in the burn barrel. After he’d tossed on seven stacks, he took the bottle of lighter fluid and doused the papers. He took out a box of matches from his pocket and lit one and tossed it into the barrel.

Ten minutes later the flames were coming out of the top of the metal container. He kept on feeding folders into it until there was nothing left. “What does it feel like?” his wife said.

“It feels like I’m setting dad free.”

She hugged her husband, from the side, and said, “Your dad is enjoying this. I know he’s looking down and watching us.”

Doug tore up the cardboard boxes that the journals had been stored in and tossed them on the fire in a final act of solidarity with the wishes of his father. “I wonder if there was anything good in there.”

“Maybe. I guess we’ll never know.”

“Dad loved to write, but he was really no good at it.”

“Did you read any of the entries?”

“He gave me strict orders not to, but I’ve read some of his other stuff. Retched.”

“Then, I guess we’ll never know what he wrote about all day. You may have burned up the entire secret history of your father’s life.”

“I think that was the point.” They stood around until the barrel went out and a cooling rain shower began to fall.

They sat in the car, staring through the windshield, watching the rain, and all the time, Doug was thinking, “There is nothing left behind.” There was no evidence now that his father had ever existed as a thinker or had thoughts of his own, but it had been this way all through the course of history. There was only a small number of all people whose words and ideas lived on.

Only a select class of intellectuals.

Wasn’t that the point?

 

Sean Patrick Ryan from US is an experienced writer who is now only coming into his own in the publication world. He has been published at 50wordshortstories.com and 10 By 10 Flash Stories. He is aware that talented writers can find places for publication, but that it takes patience and a bit of know how to get it done. He lives in San Diego, CA.