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Chapter 4: Fallen of a Hero (Discontinued)
“Mario, bring the luggages!”, said my mother Theresa as she shoved the last pile of dust impeding the garage and driveway. I ran into a now damaged house after the infamous black blizzard. It was a new day then. I quickly brought the luggages filled with our clothes, money and belongings. I loaded it into the back of Mom’s 1919 Dodge Model 30 with a rag top. Mom fired the engine up and drove through the tough, deeply arid and destroyed road.
“Dio mio…”, my mom muttered as she drove past the neighborhood which was half way entombed under the sand. Everything went downhill, absolutely an abyss.
My mother was driving with me navigating through the map. Her destination was in California where her sister, Ludovica, lived. It was difficult driving through a road without road but sand. Mom finally drove past Dodge City, felled nevertheless.
***
I sipped the milkshake and ate a burger.
“Well, rate the delicacy!”, urged Hannah.
I smirked, “Fine, 10 outta 10.”
“Thought so!”
After getting our stomachs filled, Hannah walked with me to her favorite music store. It contained everything: CDs, cassette tapes, even vinyls. Hannah brought me to her favorite section: Rock music.
“Oh this is ‘She Wants Revenge’. I absolutely love this band and I will buy one.” She picked up the CD with a pout. “No, you don’t agree?”
“No I just. Uh, It’s not my kind of thing.” I said.
“Oh and what’s that thing is?”, she said without looking at me while piling CDs into a basket.
I ambled mindlessly to the classic session. I saw the label…Mozart…Beethoven…Tchaikovsky…I checked CDs and vinyls and found nothing contended enough. I browsed through another rack as Hannah approached and I froze.
*Hey, whatcha got?”
I looked at one particular vinyl disc cover…”Die Tragische.”
***
Mom drove out of Dodge City around half an hour. “We’ll be fine, Mario.” My mom said as I read the map for her. She slowly slowly slowed down the car as she looked at something in front of the car.
She was shocked. She screamed uncontrollably and slammed her hands on the wheel.
“Fritz!”, she couldn’t avert her eyes away from that corpse entombed under the sand with one arm above the ground. She couldn’t avert her eyes from that very bracelet on the arm.
Oh, poor mom, my mother, she ran out of the car and quickly dug what was in front of us with the shovel.
“Friedrich!”, cried my mother as I ran to her. We found his bag and his belongings. One of which was a pendant of mom and him.
I stood still.
“I’m so sorry Mario. But Dad…oh poor Fritz!”, she cried.
I grabbed a letter from my mother’s hand which she dug from the corpse. No. My dad.
It was revealed my dad left my mother because he thought he was a burden and a drunkard. It’d be better for him to leave—his responsibility not to ruin the family. Now he had some money and a stable mind to return to his wife, my lovely mother and his son whom he had never seen.
In his backpack, there were two gold necklaces in a present box engraved with my mother’s name and “Fritz’s Strongest Son.”
I didn’t know what to do. That storm took dad away while he was walking from a train station but he, oh poor dad, walked the wrong way and the storm struck him without any clemency. The hammer of nature had struck onto our back, the sheer stupidity of the humans' hopelessness to grow…crops. Money blinded us that we plowed away our lives with our own hand. What a sheer stupidity.
Mom stood up and wiped away tears. “Wir sprechen dich los, Friedrich. Frei bist du. Entschweb.”
She grabbed my hand. “Let’s get away from this mess, my child.”
***
Hannah paid for the vinyl and her CDs.
“So, wanna watch a movie with me tonight or we could meet my friend, Monica. She has been my bestie since I was 3.”, said Hannah as we left the store.
“Meeting your friend would be great.” I smiled assuringly.
We sauntered for five minutes and arrived at a cozy two story house with a wide front yard. Hannah knocked on the front door and Monica popped out. She was a blonde with bubbly energy.
“Hey Hannah!” They hugged.
“Who’s this?”, asked Monica skeptically.
“Oh this is my new sister, Cheryl.”, said Hannah as she brought me into Monica’s house.
I smiled politely, “It’s Cheryl. Nice to meet you.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading,
Eve
15/10/26
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Flashbacks
The flashbacks in this story have made it hard to read, and I went back to reread it all... twice. It is now only the second story that I have written out a file of notes to understand (the other one being one that has been ongoing under several titles for more than 20 years and has hundreds of posts). But I think I have it now:
The man who died at the beginning of the story was named Mario. He was born in Kansas, to mother Theresa and a father Fritz (Friedrich), who left her before Mario was born. During the Black Sunday dust storm, Theresa decides to leave Kansas. Even though Mario is, by ages and years given elsewhere, only about 5 years old, he helps load the family's stuff in the car and helps navigate using maps.
While they are on the road, traveling quite slowly because the road is covered in dust from the storm, they encounter Fritz, dead. He was trying to return to the family, but was knocked down and buried in the dust from the storm.
There's also a bit where Mario recognizes his father singing. Since he said at the start of the same section he didn't know his father and didn't even know his name, I'm unclear where and when this is happening.
Anyway, Mario and Theresa do make it to California, where, years later in high school, he meets Diane, who he eventually marries. They have a daughter, Joanna, who dies at age 3. Mario kept the pendant with the picture of the three until his death, when he was trying to drive back to where he and Diane met so he could die beside her. As he lay dying after the accident, Diane's spirit visited him and granted him a wish, and he became Cheryl, a teenage orphan in that same unnamed town where he and Diane met decades before.
Cheryl survived the accident without injury, but she was unconscious in the hospital for three days. When she awakes, she finds that she has both the memories of growing up as Cheryl as well as Mario's memories from his entire life.
Hannah's mother, the nurse Karen, discovered that Cheryl was an orphan. When Cheryl revealed that she was looking for new foster parents, Karen (and presumably Hannah's father who we haven't met yet) agreed to take her in.
Hannah is showing Cheryl around the neighborhood, and seeing places Mario knew long ago is triggering flashbacks.
You're Right!
You're right. (And I was really creeped out reading chapter 3 and 4 myself)
I'll admit I was really creeped out by writing Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Especially the fourth. The composition of Chapter three is from my imagination of the trauma of a kid in the dust bowl era. It was so hard and depressed to write and I named Chapter 3 "Those Good Old Dreams" (from the Carpenters) trying to compose it brightly, but I thought that would be too bright. I changed the perspective of walking alone in the 30s Era of California to 30s Era of Kansas where the land was obliterated. So, I changed the Chapter's name into a darker name "Kindertotenlieder" (from Mahler) to mimic the haunting hallucination.
The idea of the Black Sunday event flashed in my mind that I had to write it. So to say about the dust storm striking and Mario hearing "Bruder Jakob" in the off-key singing and dreadful lyrics. The idea was from Mahler Symphony No. 1 (Titan) Movement 3, where "Frere Jacques" or "Bruder Jakob" was shifted from a bright D major key into an eerie D minor key. It is a parody of the wild animals carrying the coffin of a hunter in their Funeral March. I played with the sound of the storm and a kid who was scared, so scared that the sound in his head itself changed from a freight train into an ominous lullaby and the logic of our mind cannot be explicitly explained at that very moment.
For the idea of the Chapter 4, I admit I wrote this while listening to Mahler Symphony No.6 (Tragic or Die Tragische) and got an idea about the hammer of fate and a hero who tried and tried and just being ruthlessly crushed by his fates. Theresa and Mario fled in the gray-brownish morning sky of the remaining dust, they had to leave or they just had to face to face of death. The surroundings, for me, was so depressing and everything was destroyed and it was like a terrifying wasteland. The scene where they found Fritz is where I find it very hard for me to write. He was a hero from Mahler's Sixth Symphony (like Theresa and the farmers and just kids) getting crushed by a hammer of nature that humans, we, destroyed the prairies into the abyss of a desert. A hammer was slammed down many times: Drought, Scarcity, Dust Storms, even worse, the Black Sunday event. He was a victim of the disaster which he was not an accomplice. The nature cares naught, just indifferent and maintains its own system. Fates care nobody. We must embrace them and move on or just be lost in a shuffle of this world.
Thanks for the comment!
Eve
16/10/2026
E. Drzymalska
Thanks, Sam...
I was going to give up on the story because I wasn't making any sense of it.
Eric