I wake up straight out of a dreamless, black veil. My neck burns sweaty and my arms judder. Leaving my drooling girlfriend asleep in bed, I walk inside our bathroom and flick on the lights. There stands my father, looming behind me in the mirror.

Dead these past four years, his skin is the color of eucalyptus leaves, a green so pale it’s almost grey. His head sticks forward in a turtlish manner, and his glazed eyes stare at me frozen. As stiff as the day we buried him.

Ever since my son’s birth, he’d been spontaneously materializing in glass, water, wherever my reflection took shape. And despite the smell of soil after a rain accompanying him on visits, no one else ever notices him. Nor comments on our shared resemblances.

Small footsteps creep close, echoing creaks along the apartment floorboards. Rounding a corner, Brandon, my four-year-old, reveals himself, his amber eyes taking on tears. Blotches of shit cover his hands, and his stained lower half shivers naked.

“I had accident,” he whimpers.

He leads me into his bathroom, where bonus shit smears the toilet. A puddle of urine collects by Brandon’s stepping stool, and loose toilet paper mummifies the floor.

“Brandon,” I say, yanking him close. “Why did you try to clean this up yourself? Why didn’t you come get me first?”

My son’s eyes leak rivulets. Gritting his teeth and quivering, he braces his filthy hands close to his mouth. Something I’ve told him, over and over again, not to do.

My hand lashes out, striking Brandon’s rear. Brandon yelps and flinches, but before I can follow up, the wet earth smell returns, filling my nostrils, filling me, and my dead father manifests within the urine’s puddle. He’s smiling, eyebrows cocked. His all-knowing look. I last saw it five years ago.

***

Having already confiscated my phone, my father tossed it onto the kitchen table. Bearing his seemingly omniscient expression, brimming with sarcasm, he asked, “Wanna explain this?”

I picked up the device. Two pregnancy strips, flushed blue, filled the screen. An image I’d thought I’d deleted. Swallowing buildup, I then looked around the kitchen. Scattered, fist-sized dents dimpled the refrigerator door. Old notches chipped the wooden cabinets scarred, and a new bag of white powder slumped by the bar.

Standing stock-still, my dad expelled sharp snorts, a pent-up steer exorcising its hype. And while I wasn’t sure whether it was the bagged, pale grinds that worked his breathing charged, I knew what was coming next.

Drawing back, Dad hit me. Square on the jaw. The lights, the walls, and all the chairs swirled like a laundry machine’s load as I collapsed. One of Dad’s tattered work boots then connected with my stubbled cheek, and a rich, copper taste flooded my mouth.

“Hell of an accident this is!” my dad shouted, his pits a pair of dark rings. “You’re not fit to be a father!”

I wiped my sticky lip clean. It was already swelling. “Fit?” I mutter. “Like you?”

“Get your coat. We’re making this right.”

I blink. “What does that mean?”

My dad turned and walked toward the door. A snub-nosed revolver tucked cozy in his jeans. “I mean we’re making this right,” he said without looking back. “Even if we have to scrape your little rat bastard right out the rabbit hole!”

I sprinted at my father like a pit bull. Yanking the revolver free from his pants, I pistol-whipped his shaved head, and he crumpled. I then took aim, but the man just smiled. And after the longest fuse of seconds burned spent, his laughter exploded.

“Stop it,” I shouted, jerking the gun in his bearded face. He didn’t.

“I said, stop! Or I swear to God, I’ll shoot!” But he carried on laughing, and my muscles locked up.

***

Spraying some cloths with lemon-scented cleaner, I scrub the toilet stainless. Brandon helps me collect the toilet paper in rollable clumps, and I finish mopping away the urine. When it’s all done, I cuddle my son close in his twin-sized bed, his little body basking like a cat. Brandon’s alarm clock blinks 3:25 in neon green, and an outside dog’s bark disturbs the quiet.

         Rolling onto my side, I recall the day I split town with Brandon’s mother, the same one I threatened my father, though I ended up not killing the man. That honor went to his bundled flakes, the last thing left for him to abuse. With my inheritance, we rented this apartment, and I put myself through trade school, securing a welder’s job. But at father’s funeral, the sky, a wet wool blanket, released shy raindrops, and I cried my cheeks soaked, as damp as the soppy earth, snuggling a newborn Brandon. Not from the certainty of what I’d lost, but the fear of what I had left to lose.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I whisper, rubbing my son’s coffee hair. “I’m so sorry.”

Brandon caresses my arm like he’s polishing jewelry, and I continue.

“How about, tomorrow, we go jump on the trampolines, eat ice cream? Make things right?”

“You’re the best daddy in the world,” my son whispers.

Spider-tracing my fingers along his back, I soothe the little man asleep. But that leaves me alone again with my father, the latter staring me down through a window. Only now, he’s manifesting a new expression, an I-Ain’t-Got-Forever kind of look, like he’s expecting something. A confession, maybe?

I squeeze my knuckles bed sheet white. “No,” I whisper, securing Brandon. “I’m not like you.”

But at my words, the man bursts forth from the moonlit glass. Reaching out his arms, he seizes my fingers, locking our chilly palms together, and in the blurry struggle of moist skin and chipped nails, I can’t quite shake him off.