Rising Secrets

Chapter 1- Cruel Reality

      Aidan rubbed furiously at his eyes while he walked away from the cemetery. As he strolled down the dry, curvy path, his feet kicked up clouds of brownish dust on the worn cement road. The dust in turn dirtied his new khakis in an almost-taunting manner.

     Angrily speeding up his pace, he rushed the final few steps until his home came into view- an old but well cared for two-story house with an ivory colored front porch and a crisp, deep blue paint job.

     Aidan marched up the porch and pulled his keys from his pocket and the mail from the mailbox in two swift motions. And as the mailbox fell shut with some obnoxiously excessive groans, he unlocked the front door and stepped onto the worn, ash-gray carpet.

     "Where have you been all this time, young man?" His mother, Louise, immediately demanded upon his entering the room. This earned Aidan a sympathetic glance from Emma, his sister, who worked diligently at scrubbing the dinner table with a wet sponge and brush.

     "Cemetery." He replied, a one word explanation, setting the mail down in the living room coffee table. Louise and Emma turned to each other and shared a look that held both worry and exasperation. Unable to come up with another reprimand, Louise silently left to help Emma return the equipment to the sink. That was how the house had been for the last couple of weeks. His mother trying to make him care and his sister tiptoeing around him with pity and empathy.

     At this time, the stairs creaked to announce the arrival of his elderly grandmother, whose eyes held a storm of stern disapproval.

      "Your behavior as of late has been unacceptable, Aidan Frosz. Your father didn't die for you to go waste away at his gravestone." She chastised, waving her chestnut wood cane at him in an emphasizing gesture.

     "No. He didn't." Aidan echoed quietly, but he seemed to have held back a few words. Something along the lines of, "My father didn't die for anything. He was murdered. Brutally." His grandmother turned her head away from her sorry sight of a grandson. Somehow unable to look at the remnants of his family any longer, Aidan stepped morosely up the stairs, past his grandmother, and into his bedroom.

      He cast a glance around the room, not remembering since when the walls had become so bare, or for how long there'd been a pile of rolled up posters laying isolated in a big brown box at the foot of his bed. He glanced past his stuff to his desk, as well, which was piled up high with books and summer assignments that he worked on daily, but felt no emotion for.

     He sat down on the bed and leaned his head against the wall tiredly. All he could think of was the funeral, a month ago, and his father, no, his father's corpse, lying motionless in the closed casket, supposedly murdered so cruelly that he couldn't even be presented. It had been a horrid day, and he had yet to feel alive again since it happened. Perhaps when school started again, things would go back to something resembling normal. Maybe he could even try to crawl out of the depression he'd sunken into.

     It was hard to imagine that someone would want to kill his father, harder still to think that they'd succeeded; his father was one of most cautious and responsible people he knew. But now that the near- impossible happened, he needed to comprehend it. Somehow... someday.

     But for now, even time would stop to let anyone and everyone who ever knew Gregory Frosz to grieve for the poor man.