Prompt: Death bed scene. Man is appalled to learn that he is NOT adopted, as he had long been led to believe 😉
"Pig farmers. I was raised by pig farmers. Staunch doughty Southerners of German descent, devoid of creativity, devoid of spice, devoid of life. Bacon-eating, beer swilling rednecks. I loathed them. My only saving grace was that I was adopted."
The famous artist took a deep breath, hand trembling slightly with the effort of feeling, remembering, living...dying. "But I wasn't, you know, adopted." He leaned toward me confessed the horror of it all in a harsh whisper. "I wasn't. Mama lied to me -- her one stroke of creative genius. You, my son, are special. You were adopted from gypsies, artists, musicians, geniuses, one and all, you are as far beyond our humble genes as caviar and truffles are from cornbread, beans, and fatback. So she told me and so I was."
A deathbed confession, a last interview, this was what I had come to the Big Apple to gain, insight and wisdom from the greatest artist of the age. I wanted to be told his secrets, how he had slain the dragons of art, not to be told the secret was a sham and he had lost his belief and slain his last dragon. "How did you find out you weren't adopted?"
"Mortality, my dear, struck down in my time by an exceedingly rare genetic disease, one that I can trace back to those pig farmers. One that can't be traced back to the gypsy geniuses that danced the stars into being and painted the sky. I am, when all is said and done, ordinary."
"No," I demurred. "Look at all you have done, the great art you have created, the changes you have wrought in the world. You are anything but ordinary."
"Nothing but pork fat, my dear, genes don't lie," he wheezed as he fell back into the plush pillow. "Genes don't lie," he breathed on his last labored breath.
No more dragons to slay, I thought as I walked slowly away from the hospital, or, more accurately, one less dragon slayer. I clutched tighter to my own lies and dreamed of the next story I would tell.
