> "If one bell should ring in celebration for a king..."

> -Led Zeppelin

The grandfather clock ticked almost in silence. I had it maintained recently. I set my coffee down and sighed. There was no way that I could finish writing my definitive work, it was far too horrible to contemplate. I shuffled my notes for The Death Of A Child and looked at the smoldering fire in the large fireplace in the manor's library where I come to work.

I was tempted to toss my notes into the fire. Suppose someone actually read this book when I was done? Well, people would, because I am one of the world's most renowned authors and everything I write gets read. But this one was different. This work: The Death Of A Child was different. This would break the world.

But it was the truth. Who am I to toss the truth onto the coals of a fire that had burned for two days? Who am I indeed? I stood up suddenly and felt light headed. The precious notes went from my lap to the floor. What if nobody understood any of it? Who could?

There they were, my notes on The Death Of A Child all over the floor of the library. I stared at them in horror and revulsion. Only the truth could be so awful, and that is why humans prefer the illusions of the modern world: lies.

When I die the past will die with me. The past is gone, obsolete. This is different. Children should not die, it is the pall of our existence. We breath the air of the living, but the dead once shared this with us. They are no longer with us, these loved ones.

I lifted the cold coffee to my lips and savored the bitterness, the desolate flavor.

I examined the noose I had made in the corner. My maid was horrified when she saw it, but I told her it was my way of threatening myself out of my loneliness. She cares about me enough that she offered to be my mistress if it would ease my loneliness. I told her that I appreciated her concern, but my loneliness was not of the flesh and blood. Just remember what we are is flesh and bone. That is what I tell myself.

A comedian asked "Is suicide self-defense if you kill the guy trying to kill you?" as some kind of joke, but too close to home for me. I find everything around me presses upon me what I am contemplating to escape this pain. There must be a better way. I wrote my last will last week. There still must be...something...

I leave six and a half million dollars to a foundation for children's hospitals that will primarily cover their insurance premiums. That is all I am worth: more dead than alive. But these terrible thoughts and feelings are the horror I now face. I have lost my desire to live in this pain and anguish and I doubt I have anything left to give.

Except to live and show courage. I do care about this world. I do care about all the people who look up to me and admire me, even if I do not feel the same way about myself. I must show a good example. I must show strength, even if it makes me live.

Death is a promise, that life will end. I must have faith.

I walked to the shelf and removed a children's book. These are what I wanted to write. Instead, I write horror fiction, pretty much the opposite. More feelings of self-loathing, like bile rising from my empty stomach.

What was in my hands was a golden classic, a world of beauty and images and innocence.

It was about two chickens, one of them silly and the other one wise. One day the silly chicken gets kidnapped by a fox in a hot air balloon and the other chicken dresses as a fox to come rescue her.

Every story has a moral of some kind. In my fragile state I was unable to grasp the meaning of this story. I just stared at the illustrations. I took from the shelf another, after carefully placing the other book back in its place. I care about my library.

I sat on the floor of the library and fell asleep cross-legged sitting up, my arms folded across my chest as I leaned on my own spine's tension. I am very limber for a fifty-seven-year-old man. I used to do a lot of calisthenics.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

When I awoke the maid I mentioned earlier was there. She had cut down my noose and burned it. She had picked up my notes on The Death Of A Child and placed them on the table near my chair. She had made me breakfast which was good because I hadn't eaten in a couple days and my low blood-sugar was keeping me in my treacherous state of mind unnaturally. She had opened the curtains of the library and let the sun in.

She was wearing a dress.

Now I should mention she is no spring chicken, but she is a handsome woman, and her voice is very attractive. She is ridiculously well-mannered and modest, usually. Evidently when she is shocked enough and desperate enough to protect what she cares about, she is willing to forego the pleasantries and get down to business. I find her to be an admirable woman in every regard. It is why I hired her to take care of me. Now she was going above and beyond the call of duty, offering to be with me so that I might be happy. She knows I like her, so she was using herself as a distraction from my pain.

I don't take painkillers.

"You eat now." she said. I obeyed and ate off the tray on the floor.

I explained to her that I was not going to kill myself. I was addressing my pain in my own way, and I was sorry for making a noose. She accepted my apology and when she realized I was not going to promote her from maid to mistress she disappeared in an elegant vanishing act. When I saw her next, she had resumed her usual duties in her uniform, and we never talked about it again. I was grateful, never-the-less.

I went to my notes on The Death Of A Child to sort them out. The fire was cold, and I looked around the library and listened to the silence. She was done and had left, and the manor was now silent. The day had flown by rapidly, the clouds had flown past my window and the shadows and light had swung across the room sweeping it first in rays of golden holy sunlight and then bathing it in the shadows that now crept from every corner as the sun set.

I was still just sitting there holding my notes. It was going to be a long night, I knew this. I started writing and it came like a fever. Despite the chill when I opened the window, I was sweating. The words were coming, and I could not stop them.

One by one each of the words of horrible truth were writ upon the innocent whiteness of the page in black and wise ink.

My eyes were wide, and the heat of my head made the air around me feel like the pall of our existence. I prefer my species, I love humanity. Our future depends on the most valuable of all conceivable resources: our soul-carrying children. Our existence is trapped in the mortal-coil and our days might have no tomorrow. Our children share our world and watch us make war and pollute and steal from each other with bureaucracies and banks. Then because they admire their fathers and mothers, they do the same when they grow. But if they do not grow then all is lost. Death is our master, and we cannot hide our beloved children. They too can die, although the horror of this is unimaginable.

I stopped writing.

I could hear something in my home. It was the laughter echoing. A sound that had not sang for four months. I wept. It was not real.

I stood and the table leg caught under my knee and toppled all that I had written to the floor. The pain shot through my leg, and I shouted some profanity. There was a disturbed shuffle nearby and a whine of a child frightened by a father's sudden anger. I spoke reassurance to the darkness that daddy had hit his knee and shouldn't have yelled or used bad words.

A plush soccer-ball with a face on it rolled from the darkness and touched my foot. A favorite toy. I gently kicked it back with my sock-covered big toe and it didn't quite reach the shadows it had come from.

A tiny and pale hand reached for it, taking it back to wherever it had come from.

I sat back down and examined The Death Of A Child where it was all over the floor. No such thing could be carried by one man. I am not the god Atlas, and I doubt even such a mythical proportion could bear this weight.

I yet live and I yet share part of this burden. To not build this pillar would be to allow further collapse into the night. Mankind must rise above the pain of separation.

Long ago men that lived in caves had to leave their families behind to go and find food to feed them. Their world demanded this profound attachment, self-sacrifice, overwhelming sentiment for our offspring or even the neighbor's child adopted. The caveman was no brute, he was a passionately loving family-man. The proof is that our species thrived and there is no other scenario in which we rise from the pall of our existence. It is supposed to be an unbroken chain of fatherhood. Does that make me the weakest link?

I stared at The Death Of A Child and I began to understand with some kind of clarity why I must be the one to suffer. In no other scenario do we survive the modern age. Men are losing their dignity. Fatherhood is becoming an unrealized ideal. We need this.

I sighed and looked at the shadow and said: "Daddy cannot play right now. He has work to do."