Prevention: After Dinner Conversation, #35

By Margaret Karmazin

Synopsis: A single mother finds out her drug addict son plans to shoot up his school and is forced to make a choice.

 

After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions.

 

Podcast discussion of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Apr 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393117711

Margaret Karmazin

Margaret Karmazin’s credits include stories published in literary and national magazines, including Rosebud, Chrysalis Reader, North Atlantic Review, Mobius, Confrontation, Pennsylvania Review, The Speculative Edge and Another Realm. Her stories in The MacGuffin, Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review and Mobius were nominated for Pushcart awards. Her story, “The Manly Thing,” was nominated for the 2010 Million Writers Award. She has stories included in several anthologies, published a YA novel, REPLACING FIONA, a children’s book, FLICK-FLICK & DREAMER and a collection of short stories, RISK.

Book preview

Prevention

After Dinner Conversation Series

THE WHOLE THING WAS an accident, how Sharon discovered the situation. Her son drank his usual two mugs of black coffee and wolfed his cereal before she drove him to school. Usually he drove himself, but his car was in the garage. Otherwise it was a normal Tuesday morning and as usual, she planned to drive on to the community college afterwards to pick up material from the instructor she edited work for.

Do you have everything? she asked Ethan. He was wearing his habitual outfit of worn black jeans and black T shirt saying something cryptic. Probably just as well she didn’t know what it meant and god forbid, she should ask. He would, as usual, mumble and look away.

After her husband left them four years earlier, Ethan had turned cold and uncommunicative. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see his father, but he didn’t seem to want to even when Karl made the effort, which after a while, he pretty much stopped doing. Now Karl had a new baby with his much younger wife Amber. He’d even forgotten his son’s seventeenth birthday the month before, but Ethan had stoically refrained from commenting on it.

Oddly though, according to Ethan’s older sister Haley, Karl did not forget her birthdays.  Maybe that was because she was affectionate toward her father and made an effort with Amber and the baby. Sharon did not allow herself to dwell on how fast Karl had made a new family. She did resent being left to handle Ethan by herself. He was nothing like his sister, who was, Sharon admitted only to herself, her favorite child. There were many reasons for that.

Let’s go then, Sharon said. Got your stuff?

Ethan followed her to the garage where they got into her Outback and took off for the school. He slumped in the passenger seat while she tried to make conversation, and only grunted in reply. Did he blame her for Karl’s leaving them? Sometimes it seemed that way. He got out of the car, dragging his jacket along without looking back.

She