My Station Is Here, After.

/ Editor, Witcraft

This piece was written for the weekly Unicorn Challenge to respond to a photo prompt.

This is my home station, Limbo. Technically, it’s limbus patrum, the Limbo of the Fathers, but we patriarchs just say ‘Limbo’. We all know what that means (and it’s not breaking your back bending under a stick). And we all believe we’ll be saved from Hades one day.

When our train comes in, we’ll be taken up into the Bosom of Abraham. (Frankly, we’d prefer the Bosom of the Virgin Mary but it is what it is, as the Great Trumpeter says, constantly.)

The Limbo of the Fathers is that place where we men speculate endlessly on whether we should have ever had children. Stepfathers wonder if they should have acquired children (was that really God’s will?).

The next bit of gristle we tackle is whether we were the best father we could have been with what we had available. Too harsh, too soft, too mean, too generous, too unforgiving, too forgiving, better than our own fathers or worse and the list expands with each passing day (to the extent that ‘days’ apply in Limbo).

And in the darkest times, we spread out and hunker down alone, with our personal sackcloth and ashes, and wonder if we were ever truly loved by the children in our orbit. Eventually, we throw off the sackcloth and arise from our meals of ashes, hungry for the next world and what we expect will be its hard beauty.

But we don’t know. That’s the world of Limbo.

Bonus –The greatest love song ever written involving trains. Over to you, Robert Johnson. https://youtu.be/07T3h0b93Rg

23 thoughts on “My Station Is Here, After.”

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  9. Oh what torment! The agony of those fathers. Actually, I suspect ‘the Limbo’ of the Mothers would be exactly the same, and I believe for both it starts two minutes after the birth of the first child. Fantastic images and ideas in this.

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  10. Either I didn’t comment and thought I did, or I commented, and WP sent my comment to spam or some other Limbo place. Maybe my comment is in the Bosom of Abraham or even Mary. I’m not sure. I am in awe of your imagination to get that story from a picture of a train station. There sure are a lot of people waiting. Great story, Doug!

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