When your time’s up your time’s up and that’s how it’s always been. My mom used to say just throw me out on the slag heap. It was pneumonia with both her and her sister, maybe the family’s got bum lungs. But your grandfather was two days before his ninety-third, so there’s some longevity there too.
With your brother and the dog, just promise me you’ll keep an eye on him, you know how he is, and maybe it’s good for Bitsy he’s out of work, but only if they get outside, only if she gets some exercise and they don’t just sit around all day eating junk. Banana pieces are fine and carrots if you cut them up — with a baby carrot you can’t just cut it in two the long way, it’s minimum four short little chop-chop pieces, tell him that. Chips, you can break off just a little piece of one, break it into six or eight pieces and that can last an hour.
The riding lawn mower’s fifteen years old but good as new, and I just got that snowblower, and I don’t want neither of them in the trash. The snowblower, I ain’t telling no lies here, it’s barely been used, so if you sell it, get at least 300. That’s half what I paid. List it at 450, but with an “or best offer” and take 350, 300. Anything less, to hell with it, give it to charity, get a receipt, write it off at 500.
I know we don’t know if I’m dying, this is all just in case.
Honey, you want me to say I’ve got Corona. I don’t know why you want that. I don’t know why it matters.
I know you and your brother think I was tough on you. My mom, she just had to reach over her head. She kept a yardstick above the entryway to the kitchen. She didn’t even have to take it down, she’d just reach up and we’d all go Oh noooo! And you bet you we behaved.
She had a tough life. There was love there, and sometimes she showed it wrong. I hope I’ve been good to you. I’ve always tried.
[cough hack huff huff huff]
But it’s not Corona. It’s some sort of pneumonia, you know. Do we even need new words for pneumonia? You got to think it’s these dang blang big things but you always believed Democrat politicians, no matter how much I show you it’s exaggerations and lies and just using new and scary words for things we’ve always said, to control the people.
How you couldn’t see it . . .
How you couldn’t see it.
They gaslit you and now you’re trying to gaslight your old man, is that what’s happening?
You’re smarter than that.
I’m not saying it exists or it doesn’t, I’m just saying: Me, I don’t got it. If I do, it’s something we already had.
I loved you, I always tried to love you and your brother. Maybe I didn’t always show it right but Lord knows I tried.
Make your own cases, sure. I’ve presented my case. But be smart about it.
You are probably smarter than me. And sweetheart, honey, I am totally baffled.
You say I’ve got this thing, I’m telling you look at all the people in my family that got sick and died of pneumonia before there was any China Virus, and you tell me not to call it that because of all this cancel culture even though that’s where it came from and it’s the truth, if it even came from anywhere — and aren’t you the one who says we need to address the actual science and facts, and that’s a fact. It’s the virus. From China. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter to me what you call it, you have your ways, it’s just I know it’s not that.
But OK.
Don’t make no never mind to me.
Dang blang. Darn, farm, barm.
[erffff hEEEevvvvve. erffff hEEEevvvvve hack hack]
Honey, precious, if I’m dying it’s something else.
Merry Christmas and kiss the boys for me, text your brother and let him know if he wants to video he should call in the next hour or so. Sounds like they want to move me somewhere else. If there are better machines, or better whatever else there might be, just bring them here.
[kaaaaf kof krrrreeeeeeeefffff]
[kleefffff hurrrrrrrrrggggg hurgg hurgg]
If I’m canceled and thrown into some closet with the mops and the brooms and they tell me we can’t talk no more, honey, know I loved you, sweetie.
I don’t know what it’s going to be like where I’m going and if you get any privacy or any signal for the phone, now’s the time. Remind him he’ll need to give the nurse my code to be put through on video, which is 8765. But either way.
I’m videoing with him through this janky hospital version of Zoom and just waiting for him to turn it around on me and blame me again, it’s his thing, it’s what he does — a guy, a father, who my entire childhood was always personal responsibility and blah blah blah.
Of course all of this is happening on the worst possible day, when the new hire is apparently flaming out spectacularly, and the phone I’m using to talk to my father is blowing up with messages from Gail and Alison. And even though none of this is remotely my fault — and if people had taken my advice we would not be in this situation at all — it is still, somehow, apparently, my fault.
I’m listening to Dad and trying to not be reactive to the work bullshit because there’s no good way to respond to these things in the moment, and I’m trying to hear past his voice to his lungs and breathing, trying to figure out if he’s worse, and obviously he’s worse because they’re moving him someplace else, and I’m supposed to be the big sister and wife surrogate who has to handle everything, because my father is my father and my brother is my brother, and it’s all always on me and meanwhile Gail is now memorializing in an email the tweets of this woman she hired against my advice, tweets disparaging me, the company, and our so-called toxic culture and my own place in it — and we’re talking about me asking her to handle some mailings, totally normal stuff.
Or just fucking dox me and destroy me to add one or two woke points to your little jar of woke points and then post it on TikTok, which is I guess how the world works now.
Tweet
So I’m doing the emotional labor of handling this 22-year-old frankly lazy girl and Gail’s reactions and Alison’s, and I’m also hearing my father’s batshit conspiracies about how they want to shut him up, keep him quiet, and trying not to react. Because reacting makes it worse.
So you just hold still and listen.
So and this girl told a client shit like we are trash and our woke politics are just a mask for blah blah blah and that I — she called me out by name, when we’ve had barely any contact and what we’ve had has all been routine — she is tweeting that I am fucking privileged, and a nonentity and I am toxic because she was hired for blah blah and I asked her to do blah blah.
Honey, this is lower-middle entry level. Deal with the things we all had to deal with at that age. Or just fucking dox me and destroy me to add one or two woke points to your little jar of woke points and then post it on TikTok, which is I guess how the world works now.
I’m waiting for him to shut the fuck up, but I’m also listening to the breath, and half listening to the words and waiting for indications of how bad the breath is, listening to the noises of my father’s respiration, but I’m also waiting, just waiting, for him to pivot to how it was my fault for making him wear a mask, and his theory that if you keep breathing your own air — the same wet air, he calls it, like that’s even medically a thing — that somehow makes all the germs your lungs are trying to push out keep coming back in, and building up, and that’s what made him sick.
But: he’s stopped talking. He’s just wheezing and clutching for air now. And I’m trying to mentally rewind and think of what the last thing was he was saying.
And in the moment of me and my father, I see myself, I see my face in a tiny square in the corner of my phone and I’m flushed, I’m this red angry thumbprint listening and trying to think things through and waiting for it to all be over, and he’s in his bed holding the tablet or whatever they gave him at this terrible angle where I just get the underside of his chin and his hair splayed out on either side, it’s like the underside of his chin is a tiny featureless face jutting up out of the hospital gown, some weird eyeless monster, and all I’m hearing is wheeze wheeze crackle crackle.
And I think how he said gaslit, and whaaaat? Like where did he hear that. I’m 99 percent sure it wasn’t me, because saying gaslit to that man, it would have been a moment. And last year I told him I’m queer and nonbinary, so I know what he’s like with these types of words from people younger than him.
The thing is not that I gave the 22-year-old some little tasks from time to time even though that wasn’t “her job.” What I ask her to do is her job! Twenty-two-year-olds now are a whole ’nother species and they can just say no to anyone at any time.
If I had tried to do that when I was 22?
Ha.
And meanwhile Dad’s saying he didn’t always show his love right, and that’s a pretty triggering thing to say? I mean, is it some sort of deathbed admission, given what Bobby said about some of his behavior when we were kids, how he was boundaryless and weird and how Bobby hated him lying in bed with him at night for prayers, and Bobby didn’t say sexual abuse, or I can’t really remember. If he did, he said right away, after, I’m not sure any of that counts as sexual abuse, words to that effect, this was years ago and it’s not something we’ve talked about since but Bobby knows he has my full support.
And I say, Dad, quite honestly, fuck the snowplow.
I haven’t used the f-word with that man in his whole life, or my whole life, and I’m sitting there, feeling how it feels.
It feels good, OK?
I say, Let’s focus on getting you better first, then we can worry about all these details.
He says, Well honey, that’s the beauty of it. If I get better, you don’t have to worry about the details.
I tell him I have to jump off, I’m sending love and healing thoughts, and I’ll tell Bobby to call. Then I correct myself and say: I’ll make sure Bobby has the code and let him know he can call if he wants.
I’m not calling. He’ll ask about the dog and I’ll have to lie, and I don’t want to end things on a lie. If it’s the end. Whatever.
Looking down, the way the light hit, it looked like the bowl had water inside even if it didn’t. Cheap reflective silvery metal that picks up light and shimmers it like water. Who makes a dog bowl out of that?
I remember actually having that thought, that the bowl has this weird reflective interior that makes it look like it’s water at the bottom that the light’s shining through, even when it’s empty.
Maybe I didn’t have the thought, maybe it’s in retrospect.
I don’t even know if I did what I think I did. The bowl was empty the day after she died when I thought to check it. But that doesn’t mean she went days without water, or even a single day.
It’s so stupid, it might have been me, but I can’t say, I can’t know.
Whatever happened could have happened just as easy if I was sober.
I would have used one of my own bowls, but I wanted to use as many of Bitsy’s things as possible to ease the transition.
I really loved that dog, and it’s not my fault the bowl was engineered like that, if that’s what happened. But maybe she just died of old age.
I said: “You know when I fuck u that’s all love, even if it hurts.”
Tweet
She was happy to be here. Whatever his flaws she liked my father and he liked her. But she did, legit, like me too. I used a picture of us on Grindr and right away I get tapped by a 19-year-old kid, or young man, this hot twink with huge gorgeous eyes — he’s Arab, or I guess Iranian, this isn’t really a race thing, but oh my God, those eyes! And I am the age I am and I look like what I look like, and he tapped me and I tapped him and we’re writing back and forth with the standard “what are you into” thing, and I’m saying making out, oral, fucking (top), and also if the vibe is right more verbal/aggressive stuff, slapping, spitting, some role-play and he’s into all that and more, specifically he’s into daddy/boy role-play, he says, and then he says daddy/son role-play, and I’m not planning on having him over, I’m on the couch with my pants unbuckled and a box of wine and a thing of very expensive lube that’s almost empty, and I’m chatting and trying not to think what to do with the dog’s body, what are the next steps, but it’s hot, this boy is saying stuff like he wants to be fucked in the family home during winter break, wants to be fucked with the seed that made him, he wants a large cock to open his hole, he wants to feel the quote unquote sweat and toughness of his Daddy taking care of him.
You wouldn’t even have to be into it to be into it, you’d be turned on by how into it he was.
“Feel like this is wrong but it feels so good. I want to feel you at night teaching me how to take a nice Daddy cock, filling me with your load and holding me.”
And: “The connection between us is something we can’t ignore, Daddy. I’ve always been meant to be your boy.”
And: “I wish i was living with you daddy. so we could have our love and connection and do it all we want without mom getting in the way of what’s between us.”
I said: “You know when I fuck u that’s all love, even if it hurts.”
And he said: “I know daddy, even when ur fucking me and treating me worse than your dog, I know it’s all because you love me sso mch.”
And I’m thinking, kid, don’t bring the dog into it, why did you mention a dog? I never said anything about having a dog. And I know he doesn’t know that my dad’s dog is now a dead corpse of a dog in a Hefty bag on my balcony, but it’s still a boner kill.
And then he’s at my place, he’s on his stomach with his head turned back and I’m on top fucking him.
Look into my eyes while you fuck me, Daddy, he says.
A minute later he gets annoyed and whispers, Eye contact.
We’re face-to-face, his neck twisted around so his head’s almost backward, our faces so close I can only look at one eye at a time, and they aren’t those huge amazing eyes from his Grindr photos, I look between them and each is narrowed and looking mildly pissed like this isn’t what he hoped it would be, or maybe that’s in my head, but I keep thrusting and let my eyes unfocus and fuzz out my vision, letting him be this small nonwhite blurred thing under me and focusing my brain on my hand on his neck or the back of his head and the fit of his rib cage to my other hand. I feel his trachea and tendons and the jut of his Adam’s apple like a little beak in the neck and his head turning even farther backward to stare at me, and I’m steadily fucking his ass, and he’s chattering about how he missed his father so much and that’s why he’s been “bad” and hooking up with lots of guys, why he needs Daddy to come back into his life, control him, use him, teach him, hurt him when he’s bad, because he loves me, and I love him, and it’s fine, but with his voice and eyes and me trying to focus on the actual fucking I can’t concentrate, and I press his face into the pillow and tell him to shut up.
And I’m pushing his face into the pillow but the head squirrels away and twists back and is staring again, Look at me, Daddy, he says, Look at me while I cum, so I do, but sort of fuzzed out, and say oh yeah, oh yeah, and he’s cumming, and I’m not close but I’m still thrusting and I pretend to cum inside him.
I roll off him and say, Oh that’s so hot, you’re such a good boy for Daddy, I need to cum again. And I jerk myself off while touching his body with my eyes closed and it takes forever.
He just lies there, I guess, and when I’m done, he tells me I smell like alcohol and that my face is super red.
He’s just lying there looking mildly pissed and bored and ready to go, and I’m thinking, Well, fine.
I’m not Daddy anymore and he’s not my son. I’m just a slightly fat white guy in his forties and he’s a pretty-good-looking Middle Eastern twink with a dribble of my cum drying on his stomach, and this thing isn’t baseline about race, it’s about daddy-son play, but I can admit that him being a Middle Eastern twink made things hotter and more possible. I mean, would it have worked with a white kid, with someone who looked like he really could be my son?
The truth is I wouldn’t be attracted to a white kid in the first place. But anything I say about any of this is just me grabbing for whatever makes me feel like less of a stupid fucking sack of shit who needs to kill his stupid fucking cunt bitch self.
He goes to rinse off in the shower and I get us wine, but he drove, and he’s not legal drinking age anyway. So I pound his wine and sit on the couch and it was a big pour so I’m only going to sip mine, just little tiny sips, and check for updates on my phone.
Keep in mind that he had his reasons too. He messaged me first. He came here of his own adult volition.
I hear him saying, What the fuck?
On the balcony, a paw is sticking out of the Hefty bag, it looks almost like a dirty little white bird perched there.
He’s dressed and he’s got his phone out.
And now his phone’s in my hand behind my back.
I say, You can have this back but first I need you to calm down.
He goes for the door and I try to block it with my body without touching him, I’m holding my hands up with his phone in one of them and just sort of trying to move him around with my presence and asking why was he calling the police? And he says what the fuck what the fuck man it was just an Uber.
I pull him close. He tries to jerk away, but he can’t, or anyway, he doesn’t.
I say, I’m sorry if I’m being weird. I just got some news.
Then there’s someone buzzing at the door, buzzing and buzzing.
I can feel him breathing.
There’s knocking at the door, and it’s my sister: she’s saying to let her in, I know you’re there, you can’t just ignore this.
She says, Are you there?
But then she’s not there anymore. No knocking, no buzzing, no voices, and me and the kid are on the floor now, and I’m holding him tight.
And I try to remember what’s true — if it already happened, or if it’s still in the future. If my sister called or texted, or I’m just afraid she’s about to. I’m disassociating a little, the blood is pounding in my skull and there’s this shivering kid I’ve got my arms wrapped around, this dark beautiful twink who just a few minutes ago, or an hour ago, kept saying over and over he loved me, he’s holding real still and his head’s pressed into my ribs and he’s vibrating like a little woodland thing.
We’re there on the carpet, and I’m holding him.
I want to say his name, and I can’t, and I don’t know if I forgot it or if I never knew it in the first place.
It doesn’t matter what’s true now, all I need is for nothing to escalate.
I let up on his head and kiss him on the forehead. I’m still holding his phone. I slide it into his jeans pocket and then hook a thumb between jeans and skin. I reach a whole hand in the jeans, I slide my hand between those cheeks and feel a smooth sweet ass with an edge of stubble, and when I squeeze, I feel this boy’s heat in there, an almost-heartbeat. And skeleton too, parts of the pelvis I can grip.
I roll him over so he’s facing away, so I’m spooning him like he’s my own little boy. I stroke his hair and kiss his closed eyes.
I say, Sorry if Daddy’s a little out of it. My father just died.
