It seemed like a while since Steven felt the soft
breeze of spring. It seemed like a while since Steven felt
anything. Over the summer and fall and winter he had been
in a constant state of hibernation. All Steven could
vividly remember was his computer screen, which gave off a
soft light which delicately painted the edges of his
furniture with a faint white that seemed to emphasize the
room’s emptiness. There was the desk the computer screen
sat on, the pale colored carpet of the floor, which seemed
to give off a permanent smell of Windex and foot odor and
the bed, king sized, neatly organized with a white toupee
and sheets, sitting below an elaborate and unwelcoming
wooden bed rest that seemed strangely unfitting in a room
so simple. It had the face of the moon or the sun, Steven
wasn’t sure, and it had a strange smile that didn’t let him
feel entirely comfortable. His wife’s father, who had
received it from his wife’s father, had given it to him. He
wanted to make it into some tradition or something. It
seemed like an awfully strange one to Steven who didn’t
plan to give it to the husband of his future daughter if he
ever had one. His first child had been a boy, born two
years before that soft spring breeze.
     He was the supply manager for a local Business, his
job actually being the filling in of Excel charts each
month. It was the sort of work that slowly drowned you, so
slowly in fact that you never realized when you’d run out
of breath. Steven had been doing this for 13 years now,
looking at those little black boxes on the screen. They had
nothing in them but had the potential to represent
anything. He took an inner pride in having the power to
make them as he pleased; small numbers, big numbers,
divisions, subtractions, multiplications. For those measly
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 1
ten hours a day he could create a world, make decisions
about its future, its present its past, it’s size or its
mass and be in total control. The amusement always came to
an end when he realized that in the end, whatever he did,
he had to subject himself to build his little world of
numbers and letters in a way that the company had already
designed for him The facts and figures were already there,
he always thought, I’m just the guy hired to make sense of
them. After this he would fall into a soul-consuming
boredom. This was a routine that he experienced every day
from Monday to Friday, and by his son’s birthday his
routine had already significantly influenced Steven. He had
grown a preposterously tidy moustache and wore more
checkered shirts than he would’ve thought at an earlier
age, as well as having fairly large bags under his eyes for
a man his age. His son looked little like him; he had
bleach blonde hair when he was born, only to become a
little rustier into his teens, and he had blue eyes which
clearly were a trait inherited from his mother. Little
could be found in the child that resembled Steven
distinctly, although that didn’t stop people from trying to
convince themselves into seeing similarities, the ears, the
cheek bones, they have the same teeth they would say. As
for the blonde hair, no one ever really knew where that
came from.
     He was an athletic toddler, learning to walk in a
meager 4 months. From the very beginning he was more
attached to his mother, and, maybe because of Steven’s
grueling work schedule, he slowly shaped a detached
relationship with his father. In plain terms, Steven was
not to fond of his son either; he tried hard to connect to
him, to find something in him that he could identify with
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 2
but to no avail. He had become an outsider to his own life
as if a thin veil was dropped in front of his eyes as soon
as he disconnected him self from the computer screen. His
social life began to feel like a low buzz in the back of
his mind, like he was dining in a restaurant in a very
engaging conversation, which was only made more intimate by
the loud chatter of his surroundings.
     Their small apartment stood above two other apartments
and a train track. For the first year of his son’s life it
was a nightmare to keep him from crying as the train
passed. Steven, who was a light sleeper, began to lose more
and more sleep. He felt he had run out of energy, didn’t
feel prepared for growing old at that pace. The only thing
that he found comforting, his work, began to feel heavy and
bland and redundant. He would often begin to sweat in the
meeting room and would always unbutton one button off his
shirt midway through every conversation. He felt
suffocated. His legs felt heavy as did his head, and he
felt the need to do something about his situation. That
need never evolved into anything more than long showers and
a sour anger at his child. This was during the summer
before he felt the soft spring breeze. As summer progressed
and fall began settling in, Steven had replaced watching
his family with watching T.V and eating Junk-food. A
frustration seeped into him at knowing that his family and
friends were pushing him down, but his fear didn ́t let him.
His life began to grow fuzzier than ever. By mid October he
had quit his job to see if that would release him of his
carrying weight, of his angst, of his frustration but it
didn’t. Luckily he was a nifty saver and had enough in the
bank for a year’s living with modesty. By mid November a
deep sensation of solitude began to bear over him. He felt
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 3
it in his chest, an empty space, a black a hole that was
sucking him in from the inside. He let his neat little
moustache grow into more of a patchy beard and the bones in
his face became sharper and longer. His slight eye circles
had grown exponentially and his hair was reseeding. He felt
despair inside him as he realized that his whole existence
could be accounted for in things inside his bedroom, he
would’ve counted his car but he decided to sell it to boost
the savings account. It was a brisk spring morning when he
received the call, he had taken up chain smoking and was
doing so leaning over the apartment window, admiring the
view of cement, asphalt and trash. He was startled by the
ringing and dropped his cigarette in the street three
stories below. By the time he pulled his head out of the
window his son was crawling up the coffee table towards the
phone and trying to answer it. Steven quickly grabbed him
by the torso and put him by the couch. The call had been
made to tell him that his father had died and the funeral
was being held on Sunday. They were burying him in a
cemetery down in the country so he could have some peace
and quiet, about a two hour drive.  Steven hadn’t seen his
father since his last birthday in July. He looked healthy
then as Steven recalled. They said it was a heart attack,
no one could’ve detected it, but Steven knew that they
could’ve foreseen it, if maybe they listened to what the
doctor said, or if they looked out for the old man’s well
being but they didn’t and he was dead. Steven was not sure
how to react; he wished he would’ve seen him again before
he died. He called his wife but she was in some country
house outside of town with her sister and couldn ́t attend.
He figured he’d take the kid with him. He couldn’t sleep
that night. A ghostly guilt had taken over him. He didn’t
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 4
feel grief for his father’s death but a burning frustration
rooting from the fact that he could’ve done something,
spent more time with him, invite him over for dinner but he
didn’t and now it had turned into one more reason he
couldn’t sleep.
     The morning was grey and uncomfortable. He ate a bowl
of cereal and helped the baby feed himself. After washing
everything he went up stairs and into the bathroom. He
stared at himself in the mirror for a while, trying to
control his urge to punch what he was seeing. He took a
steaming hot shower and slipped into his finest black suit.
He was going to put on a real tie this time but had too
much troubling tying the knot right so that the length was
appropriate. He quickly gave up and reached for a clip on.
The drive there was not any brighter. The sinister gray
clouds seemed to chase him. In these situations he woud
usually turn on the radio in order to drown out the loud
detachment between him and his son, but he felt it
inappropriate this time as he saw it as disrespectful to
his father. The drive was a solemn journey haunted by the
threat of rain and disaster.
     He arrived at the cemetery by noon. It seemed to be
the only place in the whole area not covered by the foggy
shadow of clouds. It had the misty aura of spring all
around. It smelled of musk and dry wood and had a little
wooden church which was where the ceremonies were being
held. The plans were initially to hold them outside but the
menacing clouds approaching sent them skittering off into
shelter. As Steven went through the door he saw familiar
faces, faces that he hadn’t seen in decades, all hidden
under a cover of sorrow. He hugged his brother and his
mother and his aunts. The people who knew who he was gave
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 5
him a hug or hardy pat on the back and told him the same
recycled phrases. “Sorry for your loss,” “your father was a
great man.” Most of the chatter was directed towards or
about him. The town where he grew up was a small tight-knit
community. They all knew him and were extremely eager to
know where he’d been or what he’d done in the past decade.
They asked it with a characteristic timidity, as if feeling
guilty for gossiping in a funeral. Steven was made quite
uncomfortable by all the attention, and having to explain
the admittedly standard circumstances that led to the
presence of a big blonde baby in his arms and his lack of a
wife to show off, with his father’s carcass only feet away.
After a while Steven realized that he did not very much
care for those people and he knew very well that they did
not care for him either, and the fact that they were here
now competing to see who was the saddest in memory of his
father seemed like a preposterous idea and a pointless one
at that. He left the funeral with not much of a change in
spirit, no sort of relief. A frustration was still digging
inside him, like something in his chest that was itching
its way out, and it hurt Steven and sometimes he couldn’t
sleep, and sometimes he couldn’t help himself from crying.
He just couldn’t. As he was driving towards the city a
light drizzle had begun to fall. And the highway seemed
fuzzy and warm, and Steven felt the urge to steer away, but
then he looked at his son, and steered himself back on
course. As they approached the bridge to go into the city,
he started to slow down, parking the car in a grass patch
just ahead of where the bridge began. He started to walk
towards the very middle of the bridge. When he reached what
he estimated to be the right place he simply stopped and
climbed onto the edge. He heard the shriek and the smell of
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 6
burnt tires behind him. Someone screaming, someone calling
the cops, another trying to communicate with him. It was
all a fog to him, transparent, impermanent. He looked down
at the choppy ocean and thought of all the hate, and all
the fear, and all the anger that had built up inside him.
His wife, his job, his child. They were all worthless,
transparent. He had nothing to stand for, nothing to be
proud of. He looked down at that choppy ocean and he saw
peace and relief. Oh! The relief. He thought of his life,
full of empty promises, false starts and disappointments.
He thought of the pain he would feel upon impact, what he
would feel like on the way down. Finally he thought of
himself; he thought of his own actions, his own desires,
his own goals. It was hard for him to find anything at all.
He didn’t exist, he wasn’t anything. He saw others and
thought they are something, people react to their presence.
And then he asked himself why. Why were these other guys
being people? Why couldn’t he be a person? Have a voice? He
wanted to have a voice! He knew then that his life, his
circumstances, his world, it was not up to him and it broke
his already shattered heart. But who he was in that world;
that was something he could control. He understood now. He
didn’t need to change what was around him to feel real, he
had to change himself. Life was unfair in a fundamental way
but it was up to each and every person in this world to
make it fair, to mold it.  And a slight glimmer of hope
ignited in his chest because he knew he could change. He
looked down at the choppy ocean and felt fear, and knew
that he couldn’t do it. Not now, not now. He still had a
chance, a fighting chance.
     He looked over his shoulder and saw that a police
officer had been talking to him the whole time. He smiled
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 7
at that. He yelled out an OK. And relief fell over the
crowd and he knew then that he had made the right choice.
These people, these strangers actually cared about him. He
began to turn around, slowly. As he turned, the men and
women who were watching joyously at a saved life looked on
in horror as he fell, accidentally, to his death. As he
smashed into the ground, the last thing he lost, even after
he had lost his life, was that glimmer of hope that had
been ignited in him. Nobody knew exactly why he fell. Some
said he slipped, others said he simply lost his balance,
but there was one very small group that theorized that it
was a soft spring breeze that tipped him over.
THE END
Soft Spring Breeze / 11-12 /p. 8