Distant

Here’s another piece of flash fiction in response to one of Chuck’s challenges. The challenge is:

Three sentences long.

This can be in any genre. Any subject. No limitations beyond size.

Three. Sentences. Long.

Amusingly, this one is longer than last week’s one-hundred word challenge.

The banker died alone. That’s not to say that there weren’t people present when he passed on, because there were: his grandchildren who had never gotten to know him during his brief and infrequent visits on birthdays and holidays; his sons, to whom he had never been close, kept far away at boarding schools when they were young, now grown and as distant from their children as he had been from them, ready even at that moment to stick knives into each other over the scraps of inheritance he was in the process of leaving them; his wife, whom he had married for love when they were both young and poor, from whom day by day he had grown part as he immersed himself deeper and deeper into his work and she slipped further and further into the bottle, both of them reaching the point where they hardly bothered to maintain even the illusion they were still happily married, neither of them caring enough to make the paltry effort of formally ending their union, though it had ended informally enough years ago — all of them were in the room with his body when he breathed his last. But he was no more with them when he took leave of his life than he had been during it, and after he was cold and they pitched his body in the clay, he was no further from them than he had already been.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see this challenge until after the deadline. I did it anyway, because this isn’t about Chuck. It’s about me.

Update

Fitness: Ran 5 miles
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 537 words, 343 seven-day average, 285 average, 51508 total, 1492 to go for the week; 3-day streak