Behind the stall’s closed door, I knelt on the floor with my hazmat suit open, the helmet on the floor. I put my console on to the small table that folded down from the side of the stall, making my console stand by pulling out the kickstand at its back, positioning it like a picture frame, or a window into the soul. Only this window was filled with darkness, save for the letters of the single word of caller ID that gleamed in the middle of the screen with the brightness of white fire on black fire: Dad.

I didn’t talk to my father as often as I should have. Both of us were to blame for that. I much preferred driving out to the Valley in person, to visit him at home—my childhood home—ideally with some combination of my wife and kids to keep me company. I didn’t dislike him or begrudge him, we’d just grown distant. We had been ever since I was a kid. As a musician, he traveled a lot. Income came more easily to him when he followed the gigs, rather than waiting for them to knock on our doorstep. Part of the reason why I didn’t like visiting my childhood home alone was because both Dad and I had a tendency of rehashing a handful of classic conversations, and it was easier to keep the topic on something we could both enjoy—such as the latest family update—when my wife and kids were there in person. There was also the fact that, as a matter of policy, I didn’t lie to my father—never had, never would. It gave our conversations a bit of a volatile tendency, but the alternative was simply unthinkable to me. Lying as how you get people to steer clear of you, and I never wanted that with Dad. Both of us had already lost enough family.

I should have called him days ago, but I hadn’t, and that was on me. And once I became aware of what was happening to me, I was outright afraid of calling him. I couldn’t not tell him what was happening to me, and I knew that he would call up Pel and tell her all about it the instant we were done talking. Both of us cared deeply for one another, even if nonsense too often got in the way, particularly the kind of nonsense we brought onto ourselves. He was a great Dad; it was just that, when fate had prescribed him to me, the dosage was set far too low. He wasn’t around anywhere near as often as I would have liked. For every recital of mine he attended, he missed another, or two. My life was filled with moments like that. They complicated my relationship with my father far more than I wanted to admit.

But now? Now, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was too afraid. Too damaged. Too broken. I had to tell someone. I had to recapture some shred of dignity.

The call rang and rang and rang. Four times. Five. Dad always picked up the phone lickety-split. For a moment, I dared to think that, maybe, he had already—

—But then the call went through. An image formed. A voice spoke.

In the course of human events, there came moments in time where you can hear the voice of God. These are the eucatastrophes: the greatness and glory of unfettered good after a long and harrowed road. In the eucatastrophes, you can see the fabric of history—the splendor, the majesty, the transcendent beauty; you get to watch the page turn, and bask in the ineffable brilliance of being in that immaculate, cathartic moment when everything is true and good, with malice toward none. They’re the moments when the world makes sense, and that sense is from God, and with God, and is God.

I could hear the voice of God when Pel and I walked down the aisle and said our vows beneath the noonday light and all the discord of my life became the prelude I’d always wished it would be. I could hear the voice of God when I thought of Morris Hilleman walking through the slums of Tonevay to tell the slaves there that they had been freed; that mines were no longer their prison; that the conveyor belts were no longer their chains. I could hear the voice of God when I thought of the end of the Costranak Rebellion, when all the guns and bombs fell silent and the slaughter finally ceased to be. And I could hear the voice of God when I held my daughter for the first time; when I looked Jules in the eyes—the first eyes I’d ever made—and saw in them the promise of a life I would get to shape, and wonder what marvels her soul would one day dream into being.

They were precious to me, those moments, and so many others. But this moment? This moment, where I knelt, here and now? It was not one of them. It was a catastrophe, deep and unholy. It was one of the last sights I ever wanted to see; the last sounds I ever wanted to hear.

I was not from a well-to-do background. Dad was born in WeElMed, and grew up not far from here, in an adequate apartment off one of the less ritzier stretches of Petta Drive. He’d sold it pretty much right after Dana had been born, when Pel’s father—then in his prime—had bought out the property to demolish it and build a citadel of luxury in its place. He took his big fat check and brought a nice, affordable bungalow out in the Valley in an area that, at the time, was being cleared out for a new suburban vision, the kind you’d take a picture of and put onto a postcard. Nowadays, much of the area’s verdure had been replaced with medium to heavy industry: railroads, warehouses, and the like. It wasn’t exactly the most picturesque place for him to retire. But it was home.

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In the view on my console screen, the background was as it had been for several years, now. Spending Shrovestide day at my Dad’s place was a Howle family tradition. When I was a kid, my grandparents would come and visit, along with the cousins and aunts and uncles. When they left or passed, Dad would invite the neighbors. He still did, even when I took my own family over to his house in a continuance of the tradition. Then Rale died, and time stopped ticking in my childhood home.

Dad called it permanent Shrovestide. He left all the decorations out. The collectable winter-time dioramas; toy gingerbread houses; crystal animals—lions, elephants, Munine dragons; the musical train sets; the fake gingerbread houses; the plastic bass on the wall that sung Rally Hollworthy holiday tunes when you clapped your hands three times real fast; the painted standing stone, left pristine from Rale’s last Shrovestide. The festive relics gathered dust as they sat and dreamed.

My Dad sat in his big red reclining chair, staring at me through his console where it was mounted on the table next to the chair.

Dad was sick. Dad was… he was real sick.

There was no point in trying not to cry. Not even the Angel could have stoppered my tears.

Like usual, his reading glasses lay strung around his neck, because he didn’t like hospitals and had no interest in getting the five-second laser surgery that would have set his vision right as rain. Dad had always been stubborn. He never liked going to hospitals. And, after what happened with Dana? Mom killing herself not long after coming back from the hospital, having given birth to me? I couldn’t blame him.

Now, his glasses were dirtied by black goop and spores.

Fungus ran cracks along his head, and what was left of his hair had almost entirely fallen away. His jaw and jowls hung, pallid and tired, his mouth agape as he struggled to breathe in air. His shirt and jacket were unbuttoned. An ulcer ate away at the bridge of his nose. To look at my father was to watch his life wind down with each passing second.

With a groan, he stirred. It was like one of his animatronic toys coming to life.

I spoke first “D—” but he cut me off.

“—Who’s this?” he said. My father’s voice was gruff and ragged. Then he coughed. He coughed and coughed and coughed.

It was like he’d aged a thousand years.

“Where did…” he rasped, “where’d you get this number?” He tilted his head about languidly. Black and green curdled at the corners of his mouth and at the edges of his lips.

My father no longer remembered who I was.

“I’m…” Sickly sweetness filled my mouth. I smacked my lips together. The sound clipped and clapped on the other side of my suit’s speakers.

“It’s me Dad,” I sniffled. A huge gob of I-don’t-want-to-know-what gunked down my throat. “I’m Genneth. Your son.”

“You…” Dad coughed and laughed. His reading glasses’ chains jingled softly. “You must think you’re real… funny. My boy’s just a kid. You, you’re…”

“Where is he, then?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?” he said, raising an eyebrow. The motion made a small tear on his epidermis, on his forehead. Black and red oozed out from the wound.

Dad said it the way he always did.

Who wants to know?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Don’t worry about it.

I’ll be busy for a while.

I’m on the road again.

Fingering!

Keep an eye on your brother, Dana.

Those were just some of Dad’s many catchphrases.

“I…” he stared, “I don’t know. Gotta…” he made a futile attempt to look around, “gotta be around here, somewhere…”

His memories must have been falling through his fingers like sand.

I swallowed hard. My jaw was slack. Fat tears bloated in my eyes. “Daddy…” I muttered.

He coughed horribly.

“You… you look funny.” He said. He raised his arm to point at me, but the limb refused to work properly.

His nervous system was probably already shutting down.

“I… I feel funny.” I laughed, even though I didn’t want to. I shuddered. “And not in a good way.”

He gagged and gasped. “What’s wrong?”

That called up fresh tears. I smiled as I wept. There was still a kind man in there somewhere, even if Jordan Howle didn’t remember who he was.

“I’m…” my head hung down, “I’m a monster. Figurative, but soon to be literal. I’m broken. All I want to do is help people, but I can’t. I just break them, too. I’m trying to save them, but I don’t think I can, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Whoever you are, Mr. Green Suit Guy… just figure it out on your own. It’ll…” he coughed, “it’ll work out.”

“But what if it doesn’t?” I said. “Dad, I’ve been lying to my colleagues. To my own family. I’m a Type Two NFP-20 case. I’m a transformee. I turning into a gosh-darn wyrm and I’m breathing up death everywhere I go and I—I—”

There was a twinkle in his eye. “—You know, my son talks so much about those damn wyrms. With a Y, he says. Who spells worm with a Y? Only in comic books.” He laughed, but his laughter was impaled upon a cough.

“I don’t even have the strength to own up to what I’ve done, or what I’m becoming,” I said.

Suddenly, his expression changed. It was as if his face was the dawn itself, and what was slumbering within him awoke, rising to the surface at long last. He looked me in my eyes, he stared straight into my soul. There was pain in his gaze. Pain, and longing, and love.

He wept.

“Gen… you’ll always be my little boy…”

And then he breathed a great breath. The breath of life. But he did not breathe again. Stillness became him.

On a reflex, I reached out to him, grabbing and yelling, knocking my console off the table and onto the restroom’s tiled floor, where it skidded out under the space beneath the stall’s door before coming to a stop against the wall.

And then I fell forward and screamed and wailed and wept, bashing my fist against the ground.