The drive up to Dad’s place is uneventful. I see a giant lake. I think I see a bear and its family but it’s all white, I only make out their shadows in the fading sun.

‘You don’t come here enough.’ The old man is picking at his beard with his fingers. He likes to cover up the hole.

‘Yeah. I don’t. Probably because of that fucking thing in your living room.’

‘That’s my father. Don’t be like this.’

‘I also think it is a bit intense, Dad.’ Gina has my back on this at least.

He barely looks up from the sautéed fish filet covered in sauce beelining its way for his fat mouth. ‘Good cod, Jeans.’

‘I don’t love that nickname anymore.’

‘You always use to love it.’ He looks at her with a hint of fury leaking from his eyes, like he’s got love on his mind. ‘Come on, don’t be a faggot.’

‘Dad!’ Gina shoots back at him.

I’ve had enough of this. ‘You’re such an asshole,’ I sneer. ‘How can you speak to your daughter like that?’ I get up and walk outside. I pass Sarah and give her a pat on the head. She shouldn’t be seeing this.

Bob Dylan is playing, the yellow lights hit the chocolate wood warmly making the place seem a hundred years old in the comfortable forgettances of my memory. The good bits somehow unstained. The smell of carpet and firewood. Union songs and good ol’ patriotism, the kind that doesn’t shoot people for protesting a return to fascism. The good kind of patriotism. Sure. The wood is splintering under the weight of its age.

‘Da?’ she babbles and falls a little on the couch trying to see me as I barge through the front door with a slam.

I keep an eye on her through the main window in the living room. It’s big and wide, you can see the whole countryside through it. The flat and monochrome wild. The furious nature at the end of the world.

‘Gina.’ She followed me. She pulls a big pink parka hoodie over her blue pixie cut. She signals for a cig.

‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ she says mockingly.

‘Fuck off.’

We laugh at our joke and sit for a bit.

She lets me know that there’s a rifle on the wall in case I need to stay the night. The old man can’t come outside in the winter. Visibility issue. He can’t see in the storms. Neither can anyone really, but at least we can run away from bears. Grab a gun and hope your front door has a good deadbolt.

Polar bears hunt people out in these parts.

‘Jesus. That thing in the living room is disgusting.’

‘It’s fucking ghastly.’ I say.

‘Why is he so big?’

‘Was he that big when he was alive? Did they somehow make him bigger?’

‘But why? What possible reason?’

‘Dad lost his fucking mind when grampy died I guess.’

‘I just think its insane funeral homes can do that now. I saw someone get their body turned into a billboard.’ It was on the news too.

The person’s skin had been stretched and ripped into place over the size of a school bus, a frame of mismatched limbs on a big canvas stained with neon lit crimson blood. The only legal concern was whether his family could make money from advertising the eulogy livestream by spelling the URL with his intestines.

‘He’s still hung up on me dating girls. It’s been twenty years, man.’

‘I’m sorry, Gina.’

Her cigarette is mostly tar, she hacks up half a lung once she’s done sucking the life out of it. ‘Do you think about it a lot?’ she asks in a gravelly voice, grabbing my arm and recollecting her breath.

‘Yeah. Like a lot.’

‘A lot? That sounds like a lot.’

‘It is.’

‘Yeah.’

He fucking hates me. I know he does. He thinks I ruined him. He knows it in fact. Can’t look me in the eye. Worst part is, he thinks I killed Jason too. He thinks. His mind is fucking addled though. Chemists kept handing out oxys once people needed more pain relief than God or killing yourself could provide. You could find folks passed out on the streets more often than you could find a trail of suspiciously red snow leading to the disembodied head of a stranger. They usually don’t eat the skull. Weird amount of people here. Even more than when I left the suburb in Cali. That was a ghost town. This place is a slaughterhouse.

Yelling from inside.

That fucking motherfucker.

We rush in and see him yelling at the baby, she has her toy and she’s bawling her eyes out and he’s standing there with his walker. She was touching it. That thing towering in the corner of the room.

‘You bitch! You bitch! You bitch!’ he screams at her.

 I walk up to him and push him. Over that fucking terrible thing? That thing that used to be his father? ‘How fucking dare you!’ I unleash at him, tension fulminates from my shoulders and I pull his walker from him.

‘Fuck you!’ he spits at me.

He’s frothing and I hate him more than anything in this world. The venom of it blackens me to my core. I’m already dead there. I just know this game. His game.

‘You aren’t worth the cum in my balls you shithead communist scum!’

We don’t say anything and we turn away from him. I pick up Sarah and hold her a minute and tell her I love her. He walks over, his string bean legs carrying his skeletal frame draped over by sweatpants and a plain grey T-shirt. He starts to cry, says he’s sorry and that he shouldn’t have said that. Gina looks at him a second and Sarah reaches at him.

‘Give it back. Please?’ He holds his hand on his bald head, one big middle patch with an embarrassing combover covering it. ‘Surely you can allow an old Joe his freedom one last time?’

The poor sick old man. The victim. The bastard fucking monster who beat his youngest son until he was black and blue when he was a kid and drove him to suicide by oil rig. The murderer of my best friend thinks he can muster anything in me except for violence. He killed that little boy. He fucking killed him and I can’t fucking handle this.

I take a second to think about it.

‘Give it,’ he says like I’m a bad dog.

I do.

He’s only here because of that insurance policy anyways. The only way you can get life insurance in this blasted heath is by working for the oil men.

Jason left it all to dad. He loved him even after all of it. I’ll never forgive him for not realising that the old vampire was rotten and cruel to his core. That nothing-man. A man who was never anything except cruel. He gave us love in looks and in jokes and it was everything to be in his light. It was all dark anyway. A corridor to our childhood bedroom lit by a nightlight he bought us.

Jason was so smart when he was a kid but in his whole life he couldn’t figure out it wasn’t love.

Gina takes Sarah to her place across town. I tell her to put on those old dog videos her mother made. The ones that make her laugh the hardest.

I think about God as I stare at the darkening sky. It’s two and it’s already time to lock the doors and close the windows. I have to stay here tonight.

I walk through the front door. The old man went to sleep in his cot in the back room. I sit next to that big curtain. The one across from that giant evil thing. Its head nearly touches the ceiling. Arms at its side.

It’s him alright. That dead old man. The old man of my old man. You can tell because he has that bone spur in his wrist. He is my blood. Their nothing and gone blood. That giant skeleton looking at me and saying nothing of how he might have stopped it. He wouldn’t have. It’s a central function of the system.

The bones reflect dazzlingly clean specks of the TV as it plays the white-noise programming of affable presenters pretending everything’s okay, selling the latest suicide drug. This time you see God and your family and a new Toyota HiLux when you die.

The bones shine like a deathly disco ball. They pumped grandpa’s body full of hormones and post-mortem growth stimulants. His bones ballooned in size. He’s a nine-foot tall Halloween decoration. He was human once.

The windows rattle in the storm.

Pop ups on my phone let me know to stay indoors. You have to stay in doors or you will die. You have to own a gun or you will die. You have to listen and be quiet or you will die.

I turn down the TV.

THUD.

The old man comes out of his room. He can’t see with one eye and he pulls out a torch. Doesn’t even have a phone.

THUD.

There’s one outside.

My blood freezes. Every atom in my body is on fire.

My eyes are shaking and my bones are thunderous. I can’t breathe.

‘Hey!’ he yells.

‘Turn that fucking TV off – I’m trying to sleep!’ I stand and stare him down. I tower over his hobbled frame.

THUD.

I can barely form the whisper that might save his life when the door is burst open by a cloud of death.

I full-body sprint. I can’t think for a second except for the rifle on the wall. I take it and my father, finally gaining energy after years in stupor, maybe a near-death drive to do something to preserve his miserable mortality, he tries to wrestle me for it. He lunges over to me, forsaking his walker and clumsily resting a hand on the barrel.

The bear, pleased with itself, traipses slowly toward us. Its dead-hell eyes are surrounded by godly white fuzz. Without thinking, pure muscle response. I bash my father in the face with the hard wooden butt. He falls to the floor, holding his bleeding broken nose.

I pull the bolt on the gun. The gun steel is cold and real.

A satisfying clink.

I think about the money, I think about my daughter, I think about forgiveness.

I pull the trigger as it charges me. The bullet takes it right on the shoulder and I feel a mountain crush me against the wall. The moaning and growling as I feel my back shatter from the impact. I can’t feel my legs, the bear is trying to find me with its mouth, it bats me in the side with its giant paw as I pull the bolt again. One more shot.

I pump one in its neck.

I feel a fang go through one eye. A soft squelching sound accompanying the scraping of my skull.

I finally. Finally, see the blackness in the whiteness of it all. The blackened tundra with red in the middle. Heaven or hell. The bear’s mouth.

Crunch.