The Good Father —By TIM GOLDSTONE

He quickly found even the isolation of the settlement wasn’t enough. The words ‘neighbor’ and ‘community,’ bandied about everywhere, sickened him. He found a piece of land miles to the north, more isolated, to subsist and raise his daughter. The years passed. In time, of course, with the onset of spring, single men came sniffing around. Whenever he caught one, he’d kill it and hang it from the barbed wire fence as a deterrent to others.

Every Sunday, instead of church, in the late afternoon, he would walk his daughter along the side of the fence and show her the objects fastened there in various states of decay, thinned at times by predation from a lone wolf whose smell his daughter was instinctively alert to. As they followed the fence’s course, their dramatically defined shadows flowed out in front of them across the uneven shallow dirt – and with the blackthorn walking staff he’d carved at nights while sitting bolt upright on a hard wooden chair as his daughter slept curled into herself as he guarded her – he would wack the pieces of flesh and bone dangling from the wire with such force that clouds of flies flew up into the air and a sickly cloying smell was released so he clamped his hands over his nose and mouth while his daughter leaned against him unaffected.

His daughter, brought up in this life, never asked any questions. This was all she knew. This was simply the way things were. Her father had delivered her, and they’d lived alone together. She’d never seen her mother, who’d died giving birth to her. Her father burnt her mother’s body while it was still warm, then buried the remains as deep into the ground as he could.

He was a good father, not unaware of his duties. He would be dead one day, and his daughter couldn’t exist here on her own. Eventually, she would need a mate and to breed from him. Then would be the time to build the second wolf trap.

AUTHORS BIO

Tim Goldstone has roamed widely, and currently lives in a Welsh outpost where he enjoys walking deep into marshland until he sinks. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Wild Word, Wretched Creations, The Daily Drunk, The Horror Tree, Veil: Journal of Darker Musings, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ghost City Review, Altered States, Cadaverous, The Mechanics' Institute Review Anthology, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 11 Mag Berlin, among others. Prose sequence read on stage at The Hay Festival.

Twitter: @muddygold