25 march 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2686: a dark glare

Image by Fran • @mallorcadogphotography from Pixabay

The baby son of Edwin Ludlow was stamped from the beginning as different … not that he looked significantly different than his older brothers, but …

“He came like thunder into the world – that voice!” the architect father said.

Several of Capt. Ludlow's grandchildren had frightened their doctors and parents in the same way when they came … and had instantly bonded to their Ludlow grandparents who understood them.

Only when Capt. Ludlow was going through his father's archival papers, looking for answers to a problem older than he was, did he find an early draft of a letter his father had sent to someone he was very angry with in 1962. Edwin Ludlow often applied his architectural thinking to his personal written communication, and one could trace the development of his final letters because he highlighted what he was going to carry over to the final. The following paragraph had been highlighted, and explained a lot of things that went wrong for a lot of people in Lofton County who had once been part of Edwin Ludlow's circle. The Ludlow father was fiercely protective of his children.

“No friend of mine would ever speak of my family in the way you thought you were overheard speaking of my son Robert. It is the loudness of your voice and the childish nature of your soul you should be worried about. There is a purpose to which Robert has been given his voice, whereas yours is wasted on you. My fifth son has sounded for me an alarm as to the small and mean type of man you are, and while I will gladly hear him crying and later speaking and singing until the day I die, I am never going to speak with you again, neither personally or professionally. You will find my silence is very, very loud in Lofton County.”

The reason Capt. Ludlow had found this item was because he was looking for data his father had left from 1952 about a development Edwin Ludlow had approved making, but with intensive caveats that were utterly disregarded after 1990. The result the elder Ludlow had predicted, and that result was in progress: an underground old creek path was becoming a sinkhole that was slowly advancing on the neighborhood that had been developed, and the creek was about to break out of its new path back into the old one and wash everything away.

But Edwin was right. His baby son had been given that voice that matured into a huge, resonant basso profondo in order to finish his father's work of warning in a way that the people living in the endangering neighborhood would understand … and his voice coming from a hot-air balloon and heard on strategically spaced speakers on the ground and also from a mic and amplifiers from above had been enough to encourage the residents to voluntarily evacuate.

Upon coming home from this work, Capt. Ludlow had gotten out of his car in front of the home to which he and his family had voluntarily evacuated. None of his grandchildren were up yet, but he remembered coming home from work and being able to pick out each of his grandchildren's voices … and further back, their parents who were his children when he came home from deployment. Those two had fallen silent forever, by their own choice … but the seven grandchildren were alive and thriving, and there was a purpose for each of their voices.

It was then, at last, years delayed, that the reality that the voices of his two children would forevermore be silent to both him and their children ripped through the captain … the pain staggered him, but he accepted it and let it roll through him … for a moment it seemed that the dark glare of the Grim Reaper had fallen on him, for there were several moments in which the pain seemed so severe that he felt could not breathe.The waves of pain just ebbed and flowed … but Capt. Ludlow was already in a state of acceptance, and so the storm passed over and he went into the house, just in time to meet five-year-old Robert Edward Ludlow III stumbling sleepily out of his room, looking for his grandfather and their morning coffee.

“Good morning, Papa!” the little boy said as he stumble-ran and got scooped up.

“Good morning, Robert,” the grandfather said, and the two just were there for a moment, radiantly beaming their love for the other across the silent gap that would never be filled -- but there was enough light across it. “Coffee time!”

“Yeah!”