True stories from the House of Parenthood Horrors. The
father who left his infant daughter baking to death in the
back of the car on a hot day, all windows rolled up, while
he went to work; it was only when his wife called from the
creche in the afternoon, wondering where the child was,
that he realized he had utterly forgotten to drop her off in
the morning—had been so used to driving straight to work
that he didn’t even look in the back seat when he got out.
The father who, stepping out of a helicopter on his return
home, swept up his four-year-old daughter as she ran
towards him and swung her high, happily, over his head,
into the path of the still-rotating blades. The mother
looking out of the kitchen window at the large cardboard
box on the vacant ground next door, knowing that her two
children were playing inside it; as she watched, a truck
taking a fast shortcut across the section drove over the
box. And the two little sisters walking home from school
along a Christchurch street, taken out by a trailer that
came loose from a passing car and careered across the
pavement, killing them instantly. It was a normal day.
4 comments:
jesus denis!! wtf?!1!!
I thought the helicopter blades thing was an urban legend.
On the "it actually happened" front, I think sometimes of the German couple who went tramping in the Italian Alps a few years back, leaving their baby in the car, and came back to find him frozen to death. How can you be so young and so stupid? And yet I've always felt so sad for them.
In late 1976, my mates and I were driving home from high school (Canada) and hooning through the huge piles of fallen leaves that had blown into the roadside gutters. Some of the piles were almost a metre high.....including the one with the small boy buried in it, enjoying all the leaves.
Thankfully, he popped his head up out of the leaves as the car approached and we saw in the single second left before he would have been certainly killed.....on the road....in a pile of leaves in front of his house by a car load of teenagers.
For every tragedy, I'm sure there must be at least 10 near misses like our one.
Erhem, at the risk of being shameless, my second novel is about a man coming to terms with the death of his toddler son (run over by him in his own driveway) - the loss of his marriage, and his new life coming to terms with what it is to be a parent.
The novel is called 'Turbulence' and I sometimes think people mistake it for an airport thriller when they see the title.
Post a Comment