I love the writing. I would have liked it better if it didn’t have the part about his wife and their conversation and if there was some background like of why his relationship with his dad was bad so there was more emotion. But a really great piece!!

Whoa, brutal text to get. I got a bit thrown by the tenses and sentence structures in the beginning paragraph. Overall though it’s a very tragic portrait of life and loss, not just loss in death but the losses incurred over a lifetime of bad relationship dynamics. The text itself kind of veered into O. Henry style maudlin, but the last line pulled it back to brutal reality.

Thanks!

I didn’t really like the wife part either but I had to shoehorn in the text message thing for the challenge criteria.

Brutal’s my middle name. Thanks THX

This leaves me uneasy, in part because of the feeling of polarity I get. We feel the burning of pain the first moment and a voyeuristic flirting the next. I can’t tell if he loves him or hates him or just plain doesn’t care anymore. Of course, that’s probably the point. ;)

Overall you handled the prompt very unexpectedly and I liked that!

The actual text message and the last line are just…WHAM. There’s something about this story that just makes it very believable.

Good to see you back (I’m a fine one to talk, of course).

Abstract Rorschach has it perfectly with “WHAM”.

Brilliant stuff, sir. You capture the apathy and the depression extremely well and, in the end, what more is there to do but press delete?

Aww…power down. :(