#29 of 100: My Father, The Criminal
An attempt at a different prose style. Non-fiction.
Headlines list my father’s crimes, but I am ushered away. Other aisles offer sweet delights to soothe and to smother my demands for answers.
At first, I think him innocent. Sent down by a twist of ill fate, but the truth will out and set him free. My father, the hero, wrongly accused. When I discover his guilt, I tease out the meaning for myself. The crime, I decide, I can forgive. The lie, I cannot. The lie has snaked through six years of my childhood, its venom scarring the connective tissue of the family.
My young mind bears the burden of the guilt, too, and my surname feels like a stain. My cheeks flush red when friends have something stolen, even though no eyes fall on me. No longer can I navigate lies. Instead, I supply truths before they are requested, so keen am I to be the apple that falls far from the tree. I allow others their shades of grey, but my own moral choices can only be black or white.
Visitation is not the cold tables and colder guards TV has led me to expect. The lounge is large, the guards sparse, the tuck shop full of treats. His mood is not as I have imagined either. His calm manner fuels my mother’s anger.
The unusual soon becomes routine. Life settles around anomalies such as these, even more so in childhood. We visit each fortnight and I donate tales of school and friends and hopes and dreams as is my daughterly duty.
His release brings change. Divorce comes, and he moves to a country he hasn’t disrupted.
Twenty years on, and when I think of him I still think of prison. His other pursuits - travel, medicine, philosophy - all seem secondary. Prison is the headline in his life history. It often floods into my own narrative, filling the gaps when my personality falters. It is a dash of flavour to a dull meal.
I figured non-fiction would make it easier to focus on the prose itself, rather than worrying about a plot, but it feels a bit fragmented and I’m not sure how to round it off nicely. It might only need one more sentence, but I can’t work out what!
I think I fixated far too much on alliteration and I’m not sure there is much rhythm - I need to actually read up on lyrical prose. It’s different, at least.
This was a good piece.
What is lyrical prose? The internet is very vague about it. Ive enjoyed learning about topics like rhythm and metrical feet and slant rhymes over the last year. I just rewrote a chapter of a mermaid short story in iambic pentameter actually, and have a couple of other stories in iambic / trochee but without any structured line lengths. It’s fun to write like that! I end up having to outline at an almost paragraph level to keep from getting lost though. Pardon the ramble, I think it’s time for bed, my brain is half asleep already