The Arrival

For years on end I have been sitting here
Impatiently awaiting potency; some explosive revelatory surge
That will carry me away and permit no looking back.
But this moment of deliverance has not arrived,
And I have done nothing to hasten it.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do anything:
In which case, I have succeeded admirably.

Read Part I at ForthMagazine.com/Charlie-Thomas

Not involving himself in the mess of reporters frothing over Tony Growen upon his release from the hospital—a local miracle by any standards—Chester Goldsmith focused rather on the young man standing next to the newly awakened coma patient. Seventeen-year-old Tony stood now in front of cameras and questions, bright-eyed and freshly recovered from his head injury, while his friend Daniel Rogers was quietly ushered to the outskirts of the frenzy by a woman in large sunglasses, pulling the teenager by the hand. Chester squinted from a distance, trying to make out the face of the woman. Ah yes, he smiled. That was her indeed—Daniel’s mother, Bobbi, to whom Chester hadn’t spoken in several years, not since the release of his book on Daniel…the Wonderchild. While the ignorant local press affiliates drooled over their supposed miracle boy, Chester slipped back into his car and carefully followed Daniel and his mother away from the scene.