Mobile Health Clinics in Rural America

by Eric Cline

About the Author: Eric Cline is an author of mystery, science fiction and fantasy. His work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Galaxy's Edge, Stupefying Stories, Writers of the Future, and other magazines, anthologies, and web sites.

Excerpt

I want to tell you why I murdered my father. But … I’m constrained.  This document is going into a time capsule sponsored by the university I’m affiliated with, to be dug up in 100 years.  I’ll be dead when you—whoever you are—read this, so I won’t be available for any follow-up questions.

I am not just a doctor, I am an administrator, and I’ve begged a lot of people for money: foundations, wealthy individual philanthropists, once even a group of middle-aged rock stars.  I know that in order for your audience to follow you to the preordained conclusion—the one that opens their wallets—you need to stick to a very narrow version of the truth. 

So I want to tell you how awful my father was, and how he really, truly deserved it.

But if I go overboard and present him as a caricature, you might say that no one could be that bad, that I’m making it up, that I’m a spoiled (aging) brat.

This will require finesse. 

I’ll list some good attributes first, because I want you to see first of all that I’m not tunnel-visioned; that I’m not the guy in the Edgar Allan Poe story who murders an old man just because he has a cataract on one eye; that I gave my father a lifetime of fair shakes until the day when I was 51 and he was 79, and I murdered him.

Dad really was a hero, by the publicly-measurable standards we all go by.  He was born in some village in the north of England, lied about his age and joined “His Majesty’s Army” at age 16 in 1939.  He fought in Greece, North Africa and Italy.

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