The Road less Traveled
The boy stared at the grave stone numbly. A light drizzle began to cloak the little cemetery in a foggy shroud. He knew he should feel more than just the cold, but he didn't. His parents were dead. He would soon be off to another city to leave with his aunt. He shivered. What would be become of him and the life he used to know?
The car crash didn't seem plausible, how could his parents-the captain of an old starship and the navigator of another- have possibly crashed? Something felt wrong, but he just sighed. There was nothing he could do except ride it out.
The boy turned kicking at a pebble as he walked. It skipped along the graveyards un-kept path. He watched it skid and slide, distracted. His aunt waited in the car at the entrance. He could go, get in, ride away, and never look back, never settle the upset in his stomach that told him something was horribly wrong. Or he had another choice.
The boy's fingers fiddled with an old parchment paper deep inside the folds of a secret jacket pocket. Scrawled in his father's familiar handwriting was an address. Something he'd given him for his 13th birthday, an address his mother didn't know he possessed. It led to a house somewhere in Georgia, but it had to better than his manners mistress aunt.
He came to the division and halted. He had a choice to make, something of a poem his mother recited to him as a younger child:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Absentmindedly the boy turned his gray-blue eyes down the paved road, slightly more up kept than the rest of the walkway. Presentation he scoffed as he turned his attention to the other path.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
His eyes wondered down the dirt road that led out to a broken fence and ultimately a highway. A place his father said he first escaped his parents when he had run away from home at the age of 13. The boy smiled remembering how his father had come back almost immediately when he realized he wouldn't have a steady supply of food.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
The boy took an odd sort of unsure step toward the paved road, than shook his head and confidently stepped the other way. His old fashion Nike running shoes pressed into the dirt with a satisfying firmness, and he knew he would never be coming back. As his walk turned broke into a steady run, and the suspended dew drops in the fog pressed against his face like tears, he reserved the last lines of Frost's poem for another day. When he'd truly know if the path he chose had made all the difference.
I hope you like the chapter! more to come