Father Hightower

 “Dad, are you okay? I can’t breathe. Dad,” Kenny said over and over again as the fire crew pulled him out of the rubble.

The next evening Kenny found himself in the intensive care unit. He could barely feel his legs.

“Hello!” He shouted, but got no answer.

Shortly after, a nurse stepped into his hospital room.

“Hi Mr. Hightower, my name is Amy, and I will be your nurse for this evening,” Amy said changing Kenny’s iv bag.

“It was just morning. What happened to me? Where is my dad?” Kenny asked.

“Someone blew up the tower next to the building that you were in. At the moment we don’t have a clear number of who actually survived,” the nurse replied.

“What about my dad? Please tell me he’s alive.”

The silence hurt Kenny more than anything else. Him and his father were at the museum next door to the world famous King Tower celebrating Father’s Day before someone set off a bomb protesting the arrival of one of the most hated political figures in the world. Kenny stayed up night after night waiting to hear some good news about his father. His entire life he’d faced so many challenges, but his father was not only his dad but his best friend. The silence led him to accept the fact that his father didn’t make it. Kenny had no known living relatives left at least that he knew of. He cried and he cried. He prayed and he prayed, but got no answers. 

During his therapy he just sat there. He literally had no motivation to live. It got even worse after the nurse told him that he would never walk again. For the rest of Kenny’s life he would have to use his brain to survive. Time slowly went by and Kenny spent night after night thinking about his father. The next Father’s Day while shifting through the paper he noticed that they started rebuilding the tower that was bombed. Contemplating suicide, he frantically searched for his father’s gun but instead stumbled across a picture under his mattress. Mystified by the odds of him finding a picture of him and his father underneath his mattress where the gun was Kenny became fascinated with the paranormal. It was almost as though the picture was in the right spot at the right time. It was as though time itself left Kenny a message. Now crawling to get to his wheelchair, he mistakenly hit the TV remote and turned the TV on, stumbling across the top story of the year, he saw his face on the screen as being the only person to have survived the attack. At this point Kenny’s mind began to try and reason with fate and purpose. How could he be the only survivor? He also noticed that the picture of he and his father had slipped off of the bed with the edge pointing towards his dad’s old coffee cup. The cup read:

“If I’m not drinking from this cup then it must belong to Junior now.”

This somber moment changed Kenny’s perspective about his state of thinking. He began to realize that he had to have a purpose in life so he began to reach out to the other families affected by the blast. He became driven. 

Kenny spent the rest of his life being a father like figure to the victims. He became known as Father Hightower. In this story we can all learn something about manhood. Kenny had lost not only his ability to walk, but he also lost his best friend, his father. The ripple effect of another man’s hatred and decision to terrorize a city loved building made Kenny realize that he could throw in the towel or make something out of a terrible situation. Ironically, a tower that fell caused another tower to rise. Father Hightower spent the rest of his life being a friend and father to his huge family of victims who lost loved ones in the attack. He attended the graduations of each victim’s children and made sure each person lost in the attack was remembered. Every year on Father’s Day he would take out an ad on the huge billboard nearby and place the picture that he found of he and his father on it. Now certain that whoever was communicating with him from the other side, reflecting on what it meant to him, he knew it was his dad. The first Father Hightower. He carried on his dad’s name and became a father to many more.

The End.