No More Pain

Morgan Richardson

A man sits on a bench quietly watching children play in the park. He watches, silently crying. How he wishes he could have his daughter back, oh how he wishes. His mind goes back to a few years ago. He and his daughter, Alana, went camping out near some mountains for a much-needed vacation. He left Alana unattended for just one minute and then, suddenly, she was gone.

He looked everywhere, he went to the police, got a SWAT team, he even gathered up some friends to come help find Alana. Days passed, and within three and a half weeks of his daughter’s disappearance, the police called the man asking him to come up to the mountains. They needed him to identify a piece of evidence that may or may not have belonged to Alana. When the man reached the mountains, he met up with the police. They took him to a raggedy, old broken- down shack, where inside, lay the evidence.

When the man entered the shack, he was escorted over to a fireplace. There on the floor, next to the fireplace was a blood stain, on top of the giant, fairly new- looking bloodstain, was a torn, ripped, sparkly, red dress, a dress that looked just like the one Alana’s mother had given her for her 6th birthday this year. He stared at it for a while; he tried to speak, but he couldn’t. He knew it was hers. He just nodded at the police with a tear- stained face and walked out.

He drove home then and got in the bed. For days, he laid there, not moving, not eating, and not talking. A week later, the police contacted him once more to inform him that they had found Alana’s body on the roof of the shack earlier that morning.

Now, he sits on the bench watching the children play. It had been a year now, and nothing was getting any easier. Suddenly, he could take no more, all the consolers, doctors, and aides that he had been to in the past few year had lied to him. They said the pain would ease up; they said he would move on in time and be able to go back to his normal everyday life again. They lied. Not only did they lie, but they had also told him the most horrible lie he could think of. He walked to his house thinking about the horrible lies they had told. “How could they live with themselves? How could they sleep at night,” he thought in anger.

He couldn’t take any more pain or suffering or despair.