a Short Story By S. Vincent Anthony
(A New Dawn for Nora, Elias, and Ivy)
Roland was a man whose name struck dread into the hearts of his children, not out of fear, but out of sheer exhaustion. In the crumbling town of Greystone, where the air always smelled faintly of coal and despair, Roland reigned as the undisputed king of neglect, a father so deplorable that his legacy was whispered about in hushed tones by neighbors and written off as a cautionary tale by those who knew him. A war veteran who had served in World War II, Roland carried the weight of his past in silence, his medals gathering dust in a drawer while his trauma festered, poisoning his ability to care for those around him.
He had three children: Nora, a sharp-witted girl of fourteen; Elias, a quiet, bookish boy of eleven; and little Ivy, barely six, who still clung to the hope that her father might one day notice her. Their mother had vanished years ago, leaving behind only a note that read, “I can’t do this anymore.” No one blamed her. Roland’s parenting was a masterclass in apathy, a slow-burning disaster that left his children to fend for themselves in a house that seemed to decay in sync with their spirits. The scars of war, though invisible, were his excuse for everything—his drinking, his absence, his cruelty—though he never spoke of them directly.
Roland’s days were spent in a haze of cheap whiskey and self-pity, sprawled across a sagging couch in their dimly lit living room. The television blared endlessly, a constant loop of game shows and infomercials that he’d occasionally shout at, as if the contestants could hear his slurred critiques. His old army jacket, frayed and stained, hung on the wall like a relic, a reminder of the man he once was—or pretended to be. The children learned early on to tiptoe around him, not out of respect, but because waking him could unleash a torrent of complaints about their existence. “You’re all leeches,” he’d mutter, his bloodshot eyes barely focusing. “Should’ve died out there in the Bulge.” His references to the war were cryptic, spat out in moments of drunken rage, leaving the children to piece together a past he never shared.
Food was a rarity unless Nora stole from the corner store or Elias scavenged leftovers from the school cafeteria. Ivy, too young to understand why her stomach growled, would draw pictures of feasts—roast chicken, mashed potatoes, cakes dripping with frosting—and tape them to the fridge, as if hope could fill the empty shelves. Roland never noticed. Once, when Nora confronted him about the lack of groceries, he tossed a half-empty bottle of soda at her and said, “That’s dinner. Share it.” When Elias, emboldened by hunger, asked why they couldn’t use his veteran’s pension for food, Roland’s face darkened. “That money’s for me,” he growled. “I earned it in hell.”
He had a knack for making promises he’d never keep. “I’ll take you to the fair this weekend,” he’d say, his voice momentarily softening, perhaps recalling a flicker of the man he was before the war. But when Saturday came, he’d be passed out, or worse, he’d disappear for days, leaving them to wonder if he’d ever return. Elias once spent an entire week teaching himself how to fix the leaky roof during a storm because Roland had promised to “handle it” but instead left for a bar in the next town over, chasing ghosts of comrades long gone. Nora, meanwhile, became the de facto parent, braiding Ivy’s hair, forging Roland’s signature on school forms, and lying to teachers about why her father missed every parent-teacher conference. When a teacher once asked about Roland’s service, Nora lied, saying he was a hero, because the truth—that he was a broken man who let his pain destroy his family—was too heavy to admit.
Roland’s cruelty wasn’t always loud. Sometimes, it was in the silence—the way he’d ignore Ivy’s drawings, or dismiss Elias’s straight-A report card with a grunt, as if their efforts were insults to his own sacrifices. He’d sell their possessions for liquor money: Nora’s bicycle, Elias’s books, even Ivy’s stuffed bear, which she cried for weeks over. When confronted, he’d shrug and say, “You don’t need that junk. I didn’t have toys in the trenches.” But the worst was when he’d look at them, his eyes cold and distant, and mutter, “You’re not even worth the trouble.” Once, when Nora found an old photo of Roland in uniform, young and proud, she asked him about it. He snatched it away, muttering, “Don’t dig up graves,” and burned it later that night.
One winter, when the heat was cut off because Roland “forgot” to pay the bill, Nora found him burning her mother’s old letters in the fireplace to keep warm. “They’re just words,” he slurred when she screamed at him, his voice tinged with the same bitterness he carried from the battlefield. That night, the children huddled under a single blanket, their breath visible in the freezing air, while Roland slept soundly, warmed by the fire and his indifference. Ivy once asked why he was so sad, and Roland, for once sober, looked at her and said, “War takes everything, kid. You wouldn’t understand.” It was the closest he ever came to explaining himself, but it did nothing to soothe the ache of his neglect.
The town knew Roland as the veteran who’d rather buy a round for strangers than feed his own kids. Neighbors would slip Nora bags of groceries, their pitying looks cutting deeper than Roland’s neglect. “He went through a lot,” they’d say, as if his service excused the way he abandoned his children. Nora didn’t care about his medals or the Silver Star he’d once mentioned in a drunken rant—she just wanted a father who showed up. Elias, ever curious, once tried to read about the Battle of the Bulge, hoping to understand Roland’s pain, but all he found was more questions. “Was he brave?” Elias asked Nora one night. “Maybe,” she said, “but not for us.”
Years later, when Nora was grown and had taken her siblings far from Greystone, she heard Roland had died alone, surrounded by empty bottles and his tattered army jacket. There was no funeral, no tears shed. Ivy, now a soft-spoken teenager, asked, “Do you think he ever loved us?” Nora paused, thinking of the man who survived a war only to lose himself in its aftermath. “If he did,” she said, “he never showed it.” And that was Roland’s legacy: a war veteran who gave his children nothing but the strength to survive him, their resilience forged in the shadow of his failures.
-The End-
A New Dawn for Nora, Elias, and Ivy