What's in a Prompt - 2. Prompt 301

Caution: This short story contains non-graphic scenes in the aftermath of the death by drowning of a mother and son. As such, some readers may find this distressing and reader discretion may be advised

It was time for Jake to accept the awful truth.

He’d never really believed that the bodies were those of his wife, Melanie, and his son, Thomas.

Three months ago his wife’s car, a metallic ice silver Seat Leon FR, had been found in the River Stroud, and about half a mile from the car were two decomposed and partially eaten bodies. One was an adult female probably in her late thirties or early forties, and the second was a young male estimated to be between the ages of four and six years. The police believed that the car, and the bodies, had been in the river for about six months.

Jake had looked at the bodies at the mortuary; he’d only taken a brief look, but it was enough of a look to give him nightmares. He hadn’t been able to give a positive identification, the bodies were that badly rotted; he hoped and prayed that they weren’t his wife and son. He didn’t want them to be his family, not just because they were dead, but because when he’d seen the bodies his initial reaction was to recoil in terror.

If the bodies had been found in the car then perhaps he could have accepted that they were his family, but the fact that they were found downstream meant that there was a chance, a remote chance, that they were the remains of some other poor souls.

The finding three hours ago of a teddy bear . . . his bear . . . brought an end to what had been nearly nine months of sheer hell for Jake. When Detective Inspector Gilgery had told him that a Bedtime Bear had been found in the River Severn, a Bedtime Bear with a missing left eye, a repaired right arm, and a stitched on purple and yellow striped nightcap, Jake knew that it was Tommy’s.

Tommy had bitten off the left eye back when he was teething, and it was thought that he had swallowed it. However, parental blind panic and diaper searches over the following four days revealed nothing; even ultrasound and CT scans performed at the local general hospital found no trace of it. The eye was officially declared missing, presumed lost.

The arm had been ripped off when, at age four, Thomas had thrown a nuclear meltdown of a temper tantrum that put Chernobyl in the shade; Bedtime Bear was sadly part of the collateral damage. After crying for nearly five hours over the wounded bear (Bedtime in one hand and the severed arm in the other), his mother performed the required surgery and Tommy had happily snuggled with his repaired teddy for the rest of the day. Ever since then, the bear had not left Tommy’s side.

The bear must have simply followed the flow of the river, and so naturally ended up in the Severn; it was just a miracle that it hadn’t ended up flowing out into the Atlantic. If that had happened, then Jake most likely would have never found out the truth.

Four months ago, his wife had walked out on him, and had taken their five year old son with her. Jake certainly didn’t blame her for leaving him. With what Melanie knew, she would have been crazy to have stayed with him. It was bad enough that he had been cheating on her for nearly six years with almost as many women as there were grains of sand in the desert, but what really turned her stomach over was the sheer number of times she had seen him in high end restaurants having a romantic dinner with his latest bit of skirt.

Jake hadn’t looked at her in that “God, you sexy woman, I wanna ravage you right here and right now” kind of way since she had found out that she was pregnant with Tommy. While there were plenty of men out there who found a woman in the full glow of motherhood sensual, he’d been almost revolted by the idea. She couldn’t even entice him to rub on some vitamin E cream to help with her stretch marks.

She had always lacked the courage to challenge him whenever she had caught him, and even during the years that followed. As much as she hated him for sleeping around, she hated herself even more for not doing anything about it. Jake’s affairs had almost become ‘accepted’, it was something that they just both didn’t acknowledge was happening.

However, one day in late November, Melanie could no longer ignore what her sorry excuse for a husband was doing. She was carrying out her usual weekly clean of the house when she found an earring in their bed, one that certainly didn’t belong to her. Jake wasn’t even given the chance to confirm or deny any wrongdoing.

Melanie had simply packed a bag for her and Thomas, and then bundled her young son in his scarf, mittens, bobble hat, and the winter jacket with Spongebob Squarepants on the back. She had then she left. Tommy loved, and laughed at, most cartoons, but Spongebob was his absolute favourite.

That had been the last he had seen of his wife and son. She’d said that she was going to stay with her mother in Bristol until she decided exactly what to do. He’d phoned the mother-in-law two days later just to check on his son, only to find out that they’d never arrived.

His in-laws had never liked him from the first day they had met him, and during this whole nightmare the reasons for his wife leaving him had come out, and they now hated him even more. He was responsible for their daughter and only ever grandchild being dead, and they made no bones about telling him. Even his own family vilified him; he was seen as a pariah, he’d become as welcome as a skunk around them, all of them afraid of picking up his horrid scent if he hung around them for too long.

The last anybody saw of Jake was when he left a bouquet of roses by the site where his wife and son’s bodies had been pulled from the river.

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