Editor's Note: "Jack" by Eric Cyr was published in "Sacred Hearth," the first issue of Voice & Virtue Literary Magazine. The full piece can be read here.

As with much of my creative writing, when I started writing “Jack,” I didn’t set out to write a specific story, and not one about family and parenthood, but when you’re surrounded by children every day, parenthood is on your mind a lot. The first line simply came into my head, a character speaking: “You know, in the old days, only a quarter of kids even made it to adolescence.” I had no statistics at hand, which I’m sure would not back up this statement, in spite of the general truth that infant and child mortality rates have dramatically decreased since the “old days” (whenever those were). But this first line felt charged—it implied some situation that would make the speaker say it, which is how Jack found himself ascending a long ladder to the roof of a barn, sprinting along the ridge, and jumping off the edge.
In the initial draft, the parents maintained a more detached indifference to Jack’s climb and leap. I wasn’t sure what the story wanted to be, but it seemed, if anything, to suggest a child overcoming his parents’ failures and coldness (and potentially, by analogy, abuses) to mount the barn and, miraculously, fly away forever. But the pieces didn’t quite fit right, or seemed too flat and easy, and after getting feedback from a friend on her reading of that initial draft, the story took on a clearer direction. Rather than cold and indifferent, the parents in the story as it stands do care about their son, but they know as well that they can’t keep him safe from every danger or free from every risk. As parents, we want to keep our children safe and protect them from any harm that could befall them. But if we take away every risk, we rob them of chances to grow, learn, and utilize their own wills—of fulfilling their God-given vocation to become great. In the world of the fable, we rob them of the chance to fly.
At the end of “Jack,” we don’t know if Jack flies or falls. There is risk inherent in family and in parenting a child. We must eventually, gradually loosen our tethers and let our children take risks and grow, and we can’t know what may result. Just as God has created us and pours out his grace on us yet gives us free will to risk our salvation, as parents we teach and guide, and then we must let go and pray. Pray that we’ve equipped them with all we could give, that they will remain open to God’s grace and vocation for them, and that they will ascend toward him in this life and in the next.
About the Author
Eric Cyr is a writer, musician, and teacher from Duluth, Minnesota. He has released two albums with his band, Cyr and the Cosmonauts. His work has appeared in Dappled Things, The Windhover, Solum, Great Lakes Review, and St. Austin Review, where he won the St. Austin Review Prize in Fiction.
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