PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook
John Phelps stood at the entrance to the chateau converted into a prison and listened to his sentence read by the bailiff.
“…for the crimes of your son against his family you are to be imprisoned for the rest of your life. May God have mercy on your soul.”
John’s voice cracked. “When will I be executed for I deserve death.”
“No execution,” said the bailiff. “You will be sustained as long as medically possible. Every day, you will be read the details of how your son, the man you raised, terrorized his wife and children. That’s what you deserve.”
It’s unusual (and actually against the rules) to submit two stories for a single Friday Fictioneers prompt but I feel compelled to do so for many reasons.
This is a twist on Exodus 20:5 and 34:7 which states that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon their children to the third and fourth generations. This generally is interpreted as the father’s sins and transgressions have generational consequences that affect and perhaps even condemn his children.
I’m suggesting that the father be punished for whatever the son did because of those consequences. That punishment is far worse than death. Indeed, it’s a living Hell.
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Seems grotesquely unjust
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Depends on how you define justice. While we don’t control every single action of our children as they become adults, sometimes we see the mistakes we made in what they ultimately become.
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They are starting to do this with mass shooters who are minors. I don’t know if it’s right or not. I do know I am happy no one held my parents liable for the transgressions of my youth.
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There’s a big debate on how much responsibility a parent has for how their child turns out as an adult. At some point, that child starts making independent decisions. On the other hand, would they have made the same decisions with different upbringing?
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Now that’s tough justice indeed!
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It is. Where does the responsibility lie and how much goes to who?
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I didn’t know it was against the rules to post more than one FF story? Perhaps if parents were held to this they might not be too extreme in one way or another while raising their kids? Extremes breed extremes in my experience.
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Any parent will tell you that half the time, they don’t know what they’re doing. And yet, Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he grows older he will not abandon it.” If we could all have been consistent with this when our children were young.
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A kind of generational punishment. Let us no longer bear more sand.
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It’s hard not to see it this way sometimes.
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How awful, yet seems appropriate as John accepts his culpability.
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He feels horribly guilty for all the mistakes he made as a parent. We’ll never know if he could have changed the outcome by being a better parent. I guess none of us will ever know.
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Parenting is such a difficult task yet we are allowed to follow our instincts and transfer our own childhood on to them.
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Nobody knows how to raise children – just ask Phillip Larkin. I think it could be harsh to blame the father in all cases, but in some it is definitely linked. Although his father before him might also bear some blame, and so on.
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True. How much multi-generational guilty is there go around. I also neglected to consider Mom’s background in the equation.
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People have been reading Exodus for some years now and it hasn’t stopped family members from behaving badly. Desiring raw revenge is no panacea; the writer got this one very wrong.
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Maybe.
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