No Greater Love

She sits in her seat reading some romance paperback, vaguely aware that her train is passing over a bridge, but her preoccupied mind pays this non-event little attention. She notices the man at the bridge tower, though. The man is shouting something incoherent, another non-event.

The man stands shouting as he remembers his son. He remembers the look on his son’s face. The look that said “There’s no time to save me, father.” He remembers that the bridge had been up. His son knew that if the bridge stayed up all the passengers would die, all of them. He knew that his son also understood what would happen if he lowered the bridge.

He screams, “Don’t you care?!” while he tries to work through the moment when the decision had teetered on a knife’s edge. The choice was made when his son said, “Save them, Daddy… save them.” Then he threw the switch that crushed his boy in the workings of the bridge and saved every person on the train.

“Don’t you care?” he asks. “I gave my son!”

She reads on.


Inspired by “No greater love has any man than this: that he lay his life down for a friend,” and its ultimate example.
Dedicated to everyone who just reads on.