A beautifully written story by Julie Rose, Pinhead tells in the first person pov of a father’s love for his estranged son, and his frustrated attempts to show his feeling while being stymied by the words to say it.
But Rose knows how to say the words to show the feeling:
Winding down through the flanks of these mountains were the small, hardy trout streams and furnace brooks where I have always fished. In the land preserves where I’ve spent a lifetime hunting, stone walls lay like spines, half-buried in the parchment-colored winter fields, defining obsolete perimeters. In the small, mossy graveyards cradled beside country roads, stones half-sunken beneath the land bore receding nscriptions of birtht and death and belovedness. I tried, even though I knew better, to say how it felt to be out there driving on the dirt roads toward home through fields cloaked with snow, cold as it was, beautiful and glittering and ending as everything was.
"Another shitty day in paradise," I said. (p. 36)
The above is a scene where the narrator’s friend is driving him home from the hospital after an operation. It so clearly shows that what the man feels and sees is something he cannot put into words when speaking with someone else. There is that reticence of the danger of revealing, or of looking stupid, or simply of becoming too close.
This is his problem with his relationship with his grown son. So he spies on him, dreams of a confrontation or conflict that brings them together through need or deed to end the silence.
Because he doesn’t know what to say. But how wonderfully well the author says it all.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology