One early Saturday morning, a father rouses his three young sons from bed and gets them ready for breakfast. He's already on his way to a drunken stupor.
After finishing breakfast and doing the dishes, he takes the brothers outside to rake the lawn as he sits in a lawn chair, drinking and barking out orders. He takes a harsher line with his oldest son, who is 11, than he does with the younger brothers. He calls his oldest son worthless and worse than a piece of s**t.
At one point, the oldest son just happens to mutter that he wishes his father would leave again. Not loud enough for the father to actually hear what was said: just loud enough for him to know that something was said.
Instead of asking his son what he said, he gets out of the lawn chair, picks up a rake and, swinging it as hard as he could, hits his son on his right side so hard that it not only breaks two of his ribs, but the rake as well. The son falls to the ground, holding his side and crying. The father, seeing that the rake broke, gets even madder and kicks his son in the forhead with steel toed shoes.
The father then storms off to where the truck is parked and leaves town.
Laying there on th ground, the son could feel a part of his being die: his soul so to speak. Leaving a void that will never, ever be refilled.

Originally posted by Wally Conley
Laying there on the ground, the son could feel a part of his being die: his soul so to speak. Leaving a void that will never, ever be refilled.

It is a grim reality. Well done.

I would like to finish this story, in my mind, so that the son grows up, forgives his own father, and becomes an advocate against child abuse, greatly helping the world.

I guess that is a possibility.