“Time is running, Mark. We need to let him know.”
Mark turned to his wife, a sharp retort ready on his lips, when he looked closer and saw how her small, callused hands reverberated. Her grip on the pen was tight and he knew she was trying her damnedest to maintain her sanity. She was just as scared as he was.
He let out a sigh. “He can’t know, Sarah. You know how James is. He’ll abandon everything in a bid to save us. And we need to do this alone. For him."
“But we stalled his letters long enough. We should just have answered and now he’s saying that he’ll leave the city and come back here.” Sarah’s voice became panicky. She squeezed her husband’s arms.
“We can’t let him come back here, Mark. You know they’ll take him away from us.”
Mark noticed that the glint in her eye had become brighter. She was going to lose her mind.
“I know that, honey. Which is why we’re doing everything we can. Which is why we did the things we did in the first place-
“So that we can create a better life for him,” Sarah completed, slumping back on her chair in resignation. Her pen and writing paper now loose on her wrinkled fingers.
Sarah and Mark owned a farm in Blue County. There were struggling farmers who did not have much to get them by. Blue County was cruel to the poor folk but the townspeople knew the couple for their diligence and honesty. And they loved them. From the moment their son, George, was born and with one look at his chubby fingers as he gripped the midwife’s dress, they knew that their son would take over the business of being an excellent farm hand.
But then George grew and the happiness that was once in his eyes began to wane.
“I want to go to school. I want to become a doctor.”
Sarah and Mark were distraught. They had noticed that light had left their son’s eyes but they had not been worried.
It’s a boy’s thing, they thought.
But seeing the pain in George’s eyes, they realized that they had been wrong in their assumption. They hoped his yearning for school would fade away but every day that he watched his peers skip happily to school, the light in his eyes went dimmer and dimmer.
“We need to find a way,” Mark said to Sarah one night. And once the couple had agreed, they worked doubly hard, cutting off basic expenses to save for their son’s education. The joy that radiated from George’s face when they presented him with a bag to begin his studies at Blue County Elementary was enough to convince them that they had made the right decision. From then on they decided. Their son will have the best education if they could help it.
And that they did.
But ten years later, Sarah and Mark had worked themselves to near-penury. Then they made the grave mistake of borrowing from a loan shark. They had thought that the farm would be able to pay it back. But then the floods came and now their farm was lost. Neck-deep in debt and with the loan sharks sending daily threats. The old couple knew that it was over.
But they were determined to make a final sacrifice. They’d already accumulated money that was sure to take care of their George’s education till when he could start working. And now they were going to give what was left to him as well.
Sarah looked at her husband. Forty-five years as a couple and twenty of those years as parents and she could practically see the resolution in his eyes.
“Time is running, Mark. What should I say?”
Mark paused. “Write to him... that we are fine. Make it as convincing as you can. By the time he can genuinely begin to worry, it would have been long over.”
Tears pooled in Sarah’s eyes. “And us?”
“We’ll be together. In life and even in death. Like we promised.”
What I see?
An old couple in a farmhouse with deep scowls on their faces.
What I Feel?
An overwhelming feeling of tension, distraught and impending doom.
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