“Inheritance” by Luke Wortley

“My father’s horns come in during the divorce proceedings. They erupt, seemingly overnight, arcing around the sides of his head in a ribbed, cochlear spiral, ending in rounded tips.”

Maybe this is silly or unnecessary to say, because I could probably say it for every story I accept and publish, but “Inheritance” pulled me in from the very first sentence, never let me go, and just really knocked me out. One of those stories that, even before I’ve finished my first read, I’m already all but sure I’ll accept it and am already getting excited to get to share it with readers. Everything here feels so honest and true — an idea and aspect of writing we’ll wrestle with some in our follow-up interview, coming next Tuesday — while also just off-kilter enough to feel new and exciting, unexpected at every turn, keeping me invested from that very first sentence until the end.

I really hope you all enjoy this as much as I have!

—Aaron Burch

---

My father’s horns come in during the divorce proceedings. They erupt, seemingly overnight, arcing around the sides of his head in a ribbed, cochlear spiral, ending in rounded tips. It’s a strange thing to witness divorce as an adult, knowing all the inherited habits from handling confrontation to the way I hold a pint glass. That there’s this monster in me, too. That I have the potential to ruin a family. So, here’s the long and short of it. One day, there he is in the Mercedes with the hail-damaged hood, shouting at my mother while I’m home from grad school. The next, he’s in a new house with Barb, spinning images of matching ring tattoos and burbling about how they’ll come visit soon. Eventually, the separation is complete between my parents, and all the while my sister and I are pretending his horns aren’t there.

*

A few years ago, my father drank so much that he started crying at the very mention of his name. He heaved his sobs like bombing cicada song, vibrating furiously in the doorway as we watched. He’d kicked the ice and what was left of his cocktail out of his tumbler and charged out of the house with me screaming behind him. He mounted the four-wheeler, revved the engine, and took off toward the barn, careening through the ditch. He hit a divot in the back forty, and I saw his form fall through the night, the diaphanous twist of his wrists as they gleamed in starlight. He broke his collarbone and came back to the family in tatters. I mark this event as the beginning of the end, listening to him grunt in the hospital bed. I wonder if the horns were growing, then, all the same.

*

My mom calls me after I tell her I’m dating someone with an eleven-month-old son. I can hear her voice crackling with merlot, can see her throat bobbing up and down between snorts as she asks me how I plan to take care of a kid. Then she starts in on my father yet again. She’s packing up the house and has hired a girlfriend to sell some things at her side-hustle consignment business. The woman I’m dating is Crystal, and her son’s name is James. I tell my mom that she and her son are about the closest thing to family I have right now. Her laughter dribbles into the line before turning into the first echoes of a sob. In the other room, Crystal is stirring a pot on the stove. I ask my mom if she knows about the horns. She tells me she’s always known.

*

A few months after the divorce finalizes, my father invites me to come watch a college football game. His voice easy and slanting trough the speaker as he talks, completely relaxed. I can hear Barb and her sons in the background. He must be in the car. I decline. We haven’t spoken in a while. He tells me that Barb is just like me and Crystal and James, that we’re both just taking on new roles. That there’s a thread linking us somehow in a cosmic sense, a tether beyond fatherhood. I decide, for the sake of the relationship, not to mention how worried I am about the horns, how insanely angry I am that he would compare our circumstances. But he’s distracted. In my mind, I can see the boisterous curves on the sides of his head. All I can see is horns.  We lose touch for a while.  

One night, up late, I check in on James sleeping, watch the invariable rise and fall of his ribcage. And I think to myself, stupefied, on one hand, how onerous it would be to remember to breathe and on the other how unbelievably grateful I am that it is so automatic, so taken for granted. I watch his nostrils dilate, his eyelids slither. I watch him with such sorrow that I feel my own breath catch in my chest as I ease an arm over the railing of the crib, feel the tiny rhythm. Moonlight pools over his form, slicing my hand. I feel his forehead, my own, checking for the slightest whisper of a nub.

*

It's been a year since the invitation to the football game, and my sister comes to visit. She rolls around on the floor next to James while I contemplate the weight of my father’s head, the way it might feel in his own hands, in mine. My sister insists that they’re not there, that if they are, they’re simply a manifestation of my resentment, something I’m willing to see. So I ask her, just as she’s about to pull out of the drive, if they’re just something she’s not willing to see. I’m gesticulating wildly to her, drawing crazed spirals in the air. As I do, a heat just above my eyes swells. She shrugs and leaves.

*

I buy an engagement ring. Crystal knows I’m about to buy it but not when I’m going to ask her. So, we make jokes about getting ring tattoos. As if on cue, my father calls me out of the blue asking if he can come and visit. He and Barb arrive in December just as a gauzy snowstorm leans on the bitter breeze. He asks for a cocktail after a few minutes, then pulls me aside to the office to announce his own wedding to Barb. In the next room, I can sense the strained silence between Crystal and Barb, interrupted only by the innocent twinkle of James’s noises. He asks me to be his best man, an absurd request I acquiesce to, the heat rising in my forehead. His head stoops in front of me, the great, curling masses somehow smooth as jet, gleaming wetly. And then he lifts his head, with what seems like considerable effort, and snorts out yet another request. He asks that we call Barb grandma. I say to him that we should wait on that…that James barely knows who she is, that he already has Crystal’s folks and my mom. It might just confuse the boy. Not to mention I barely know her. His silence is foreboding. We struggle through dinner at a chain restaurant, his head becoming harder to hold upright after each drink. When they leave, I notice that the pillowcase has been punctured. We don’t speak again for some time.

*

Two years later, Crystal and I marry in a sweltering ceremony in the hills of Tennessee. We pack our friends into a cabin and sing the night away on balconies overlooking a cypress grove and a winding tributary of a nearby river. We drink until the world blurs and churns. My father shows up to the wedding, his neck struggling to stay straight under the weight of his horns. My friends and Crystal’s family manage not to make a big deal about them, sidestepping any mention. But James points and asks. My father sniffs in anger and stalks off, shouldering my father-in-law on the way out of the cabin. He leaves a check for $1,000 on a bench near the parking lot. It’s addressed to both of us, but he doesn’t know that Crystal hasn’t taken my last name, so it reads all wrong. We stop talking again.

*

Several months after the wedding, the three of us go to visit my mom at her new house, the old having been packed up and trashed or sold at consignment. She’s drinking more, and I find half-empty coffee cups with stale wine all over the house. They’re like little artifacts. She waves away my concern when we’re alone, Crystal and James having laid down for a nap. She tells me she has friends over and that she hasn’t been as diligent about the house as she used to be. Then she gets angry. She asks me if I remember, when I was sixteen, stealing all their liquor and yelling in her face. I remember a lot about that night, how my best friend and I giggled as we tumbled together all over the floor until he threw up; how, when caught, we went outside in the yard so we could let Jason sleep it off. Some fury coiled in my stomach and just unleashed when my father began to berate me, but I couldn’t stand up to him, so I turned toward my mom, bellowing incoherently. I remember how unstoppable the rage and hate had been. Then a fist slamming into my chest and my legs careening out from under me. Staring up at the twisting vertebrae of night, face-up in the bluegrass. My father standing over me, eyes wide, glittering fists raised. I remember my chest hurt as I cried, screaming how sorry I was. In the kitchen, I tell her what I remember. She gets up and pours another glass of wine with shaking hands. That’s about right, she says, and I’m sorry. Me too, I say.

It’s been another two years since the wedding, and I still haven’t spoken to my father. Crystal and I are also having problems in sets of two. Two miscarriages absolutely pummel our relationship. Long stretches of aching silence followed by eruptions of seemingly unending shouts. The first ended with us sobbing in the bathroom. The second ended in the hospital with a crushingly necessary D&C. The state law mandated that we had to sign a form saying we didn’t want to have a memorial service for the remains. Remains. The word lacquers my tongue even as I can’t say it aloud. I looked over to Crystal, her face slackening as we signed. Our sex life hasn’t recovered, and we’re totally out-of-sync. There’s no telling how much I’m at fault, but I know our lack of intimacy falls on me as the other set of two came rolling in just as we were starting to recover. At a friend’s wedding down in Georgia, I got insanely hammered, didn’t take my meds, and swirled on the dance floor into the arms of not one but two men. At the time, it seemed like harmless fun, but she caught me texting with one of them months after the fact, the traces of my indiscretion slathered all across the screen. I’m afraid my betrayal knows no bounds, and my head aches all the time from the sorrow of just how deep I can go. We try not to fight around James, but the pressure leaks into the very air, hanging on our breaths. I keep checking my forehead in the mirror, lifting my hair, inspecting the curvature, waiting to see if something might be growing. The truth is, I’m a terrible partner and father, just like him. We have knock-down-drag-outs. I rip clothes, throw myself prostrate, fly into the most uncontrollable dizzy fits of babbling my apologies and my defenses at the same time. I stop sleeping and start twitching at every shadow in the night. I start calling the suicide hotline and hanging up, staring at the fireplace. I pet the cat. I try and slip back into comfort with Crystal, and I know she’s trying, too. But we shouldn’t have to try, I wail one night. She tells me that I need to go talk to someone, that she’s not sure which version of me she’s getting on a daily basis, and I’m moving through life in an impenetrable fog, it seems. I agree to start seeing someone and am diagnosed bipolar 2, and then, after about a year of intermittent apology, a year of slow starts and broken kisses, we find our bodies’ fit again, sidewind into each other.

*

I get a call from my sister telling me that she sees them, now, the horns. That she knows they’re there and is sobbing about how she never noticed them before. I don’t understand why it’s so upsetting to her, and I tell her as much. She says she doesn’t know why, only that she can’t believe she couldn’t see them. I ask her what she thinks changed. She composes herself on the other end with a crackling set of breaths. She tells me that he told her he has to get them removed, that he needs complicated surgery. She tells me how heavy his head looked, how incomprehensibly feeble he suddenly appeared once she saw what had sprouted from his head, these enormous curlicuing keratin masses. A call from my mom beeps in while I’m listening to my sister breathe.

*

My life seems to be episodes of phone calls that revolve around waiting to see if my father is on the line. Sometimes I ignore calls from Barb, thinking he’s put her up to it, sitting with his head bowed low and barking out orders, the sounds of ice sloshing in the background. On the phone, my sister tells me the drinking is as bad as it’s ever been, and I feel a twinge in the back of my throat. On the phone, my mom ebbs and flows between sobs and punctuated laughter, her voice all syncopated and at the wrong angles. On the phone, I drone through the workday and think of my father’s horns. On the phone, Crystal asks if I can pick up dinner.

*

I get a call from Barb again, and this time I pick up, ask her what on earth she could want. But her breathless hiss comes through, sprouts in my ear. She says that my father needs surgery, that the horns have to come out. Okay, I say, but she’s crying full on, telling me that he’s gone. While I’m on the phone with her, an unknown number beeps in, but I ignore it.

My father has apparently been gone for nearly six months when I’m in a bar by myself and I see him walk in, head swinging in small arcs, bent low. He doesn’t see me right away, and I don’t move, thinking that it’s only a matter of time before we have this moment anyway, before I have to confront the beast he’s become. And then he’s there next to me, asking about Crystal and James, as though he gives a shit. As though it’s not obvious something is wrong and I’m here, after all, watching a random hockey game on a Tuesday night, poring over a sign that reads “Every time you tip your bartender, Justin Bieber gets hit in the face with a Rolling Stones Album.” There’s a certain sadness to the place that is good company, though, and after I let him buy me another bourbon, I ask him about Barb, prodding. I want to see what he says. He looks at me with bulbous, black eyes that gorge on the already dim light. They’re so glassy and round, nearly bovine. But he simply laughs, gets up, and says that I don’t really get to ask him about that. He slinks out of the bar and back into the night. The bartender asks me if I’m okay, if I knew that guy. Once, I say.

*

Crystal and I are on the fritz again. I’m not exactly sure what the triggers have been, but there’s just a bowstring tension between us. She says I’m obsessed with my dad, that I drink too much, that she’s still scared I’m going to leave her and never wanted this to begin with. This last point isn’t new. It circles us. It’s the hammer stroke in every argument, the thing she knows will send me to the moon. I tell her that I’m not actually obsessed with my dad, that it’s something that causes deep pain, that we used to be best friends and now we don’t even speak. I haven’t told her about the encounter at the bar. Her eyes mist over when I talk about him, and I go blind with rage when she claims that I’m never happy, that she and James aren’t enough, will never be enough.

*

I’m drinking more than usual and sloshing my way around town to my father’s old haunts, and I don’t know why. My forehead constantly buzzes with a muffled pain, and I’ve taken to watching James sleep at night for hours on end, my mouth constantly poised over the rim of a tumbler filled with bourbon and Sprite with a squeezed lime. The same drink my father used to sink into while he nestled into the haunches of a recliner before falling asleep. I’m turning up at dingy bars, creeping in the parking lot of his old work (My sister has informed me that he lost his job but can’t say what he’s doing now. She can only suppress sighs of sadness when she calls me, ask if I’m okay and how are Crystal and James), even driving past the old house perched on top of the hill, fescue overgrowing the fenceline. I can’t stop wisping through town like a shattered ghost, following my memories of him. I want to know why he left, why our troubles come in pairs, as he seems to have deserted not one but two families. Most of all, I want to know whether my own set of horns will grow and I’ll be forced to abandon another set of two. I think of Crystal’s tear the last time she caught me staring at James in the bedroom, the haze through which I stumbled up, spilled my drink.

*

It’s been just over a year since my father left that bar, and I’ve stopped following him altogether. Mostly slowed down drinking, except for the odd night when Crystal and I both tie one on, which has the desired effect more often than not. We both know it’s unhealthy, but the sex is incredible, as far as we’re concerned. Our bodies seem to writhe in the right way as we tumble into each other after a few drinks. James sleeps while we laugh. The times it doesn’t work we tend to sulk over a computer screen in silence, streaming whatever we’ve found that won’t demand too much brain power.

*

I get a call from my mom. She’s doing surprisingly well, now. Seems to have flattened the waves of anger and grief over my father’s leaving. She asks me how I’m doing, which is how it always starts with anyone. I say I’m doing fine, that Crystal and I have patched things up. She asks about James, if I’ve talked to my sister. My life seems to be a maelstrom of waiting for the next phone call. I tell her I haven’t spoken to my sister in a while, that each time we do, it always becomes about dad. I’m sick of it.

*

I get a call from Barb. She says she packed up and tried to follow him, to find him, to bring him home. But he’s slipping away, she frantically blurts. He’s in Tennessee, in Gatlinburg. He’s in Charleston, South Carolina. He’s Hiking the Appalachian Trail. She says they’re running out of money, that she can’t do this much longer. What are you going to do? she asks. What am I supposed to do? I respond.  The drinking has picked back up, and I’m working from home, now with a new job at a non-profit, so it’s easy to crack a beer and sit with the camera off on a Zoom. I’ve transitioned away from bourbon for the most part, the fiery memory of it on my throat too reminiscent of that night in the bar when I saw him last.

I’m home alone with James. Crystal has gone out with friends, and she left in a huff. Our sex life has taken a turn for the worse, and she’s largely quit drinking, but we perform the perfunctory duties, raise the kid, say goodnight, rarely fight anymore. I don’t know why she’s mad, only that she is. But she trusts me with our son. When I put him to bed that night, when I breathe in the scent of his innocence as I kiss his hair, I have a searing pain on both sides of my head for just a moment.

*

I get a call from my sister. She asks if I’ve talked to Barb. The answer is yes, but for fun I tell her no, I haven’t. Dad has turned up in Los Angeles, apparently. She sends me a text with a link to an interview with the horned man, the stuff of legend. Why are you showing me this? I ask. Just thought you’d want to know, she says. Also, can I talk to you about something? she asks. Sure, I say. Never mind, she says and hangs up. I grab a beer and go back to typing up the needs assessment section of a grant application, trying to show just how desperate our target population is for interventions.

*

Dad is getting interviews all over the country, and he’s managed to monetize his horns, so I don’t hear from Barb, but mom calls me nonstop. She bitches about his money, about how she sees none of it anymore, just what he used to make and what the fuck must he be doing now that he’s basically on tour, and what about that hoe who stole him from the family, who wrecked everything. She’s started to call him the hole. So they can be the hoe and the hole. At first it’s funny, but she’s starting to slur her words every time we chat, and my sister is getting worried. Did you see where he is, now? mom asks. No, I say. Fucking Sweden, she says. Okay, I say. I don’t have time for this, but I listen. I listen to the entire rant and crack open a beer, then get ready for dinner with the family.

*

An unknown number calls. I know it’s him. I just know it. I saw there’s a new show about him streaming. Crystal asks if I’m okay. The pain on both sides of my head hasn’t gone away. I’ve taken to rubbing my temples even when it doesn’t hurt. My son’s hair starts to smell of fresh cut grass.

*

One day, after the family has gone to bed, I’ve been pulled back to a bottle of bourbon, and I pick up for the unknown number. It’s him, sober as the day is long, asking me if I want to meet up.

*

I’m on a plane to Minneapolis sitting in 13B wearing a plain blue button-down shirt and chinos with a navy blazer draped across my lap. I wanted to dress up. I’ve let my beard grow a bit. I keep checking my phone even though we’re thousands of feet in the air, tapping random apps, closing them, swiping up. I haven’t seen my father since that time when he was swinging his horns side to side in that bar, almost like he was disappointed, since he walked out huffing and stamping his feet at my audacious line of questioning. And now he’s in Minnesota. It’s January, and I’ve inexplicably decided to go and see him. Crystal and I had a thunderous fight about it, but she ended up just telling me to do what I wanted, that she’d deal with the house and the kid. I’ve not told my mom or sister.

*

My father and I used to be best friends. He coached all my sports. Told me how everything was going to be alright in the middle of the night. I never went to my mother, ever, never to explain anything until the divorce, until the horns grew in and I saw him for what he was. But when I was a kid he was my idol, and I can’t tell if it’s just me and this pint at the airport bar but I still remember his head hanging heavy even then, the way his snorts were supple and scuttling on the breeze as we walked down to the creek so he could show me how to scoop up a crawfish. I remember the stooping of his shoulders, the gleam in his suddenly dark eyes, now, even though they’d been jagged blue for most of my memory. I’d been drinking on the plane, too, and in the airport on the way. I keep checking my phone for word from Crystal, from my mother, from my sister. But it’s all gone as I’m waiting for him to pick me up here in Minneapolis in the dead of winter. It’s cold, and still more memories come back. Him dragging me and my sister on sleds on the four-wheeler. Grinding through the slush in the back forty to help our neighbor move a dead cow. I keep thinking about how all the good things in this world happen quickly, how there’s no reservation when it comes to their speed, no waiting. On the screen above the bar there’s a hockey game. We used to text about it every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night during the regular season. Would complain when the playoffs rolled around, commiserate when our teams didn’t make it, and then there was that magical run my team had nearly ten years ago when I was graduating college. The sides of my head hurt as I order another beer. I’m not sure if he’ll pick me up or not. I text my sister where I am, wait for a response. The fog of drink and misery and memory is confounding and comforting at the same time. I want to sink into the suds of this beer glass, for this all to be a joke, for there to be a reason for him telling me he couldn’t make it in when I landed, for there to be something at the end, for there to be reconciliation, perfunctory and performative apology, something I could sink my teeth into and tell Crystal about, something I could wrap my head around. So, I wait at the bar.

Eventually I’m in his car, but my mind is made of cotton. He’s greeted me, and I can’t even tell how he drives with his head so heavy. But we wind through the gray of the outskirts of the city and over the Mississippi River. I ask him how he got to Minneapolis. Speaking gig, he says. Oh, I say. What exactly do you talk about on these trips? How to live, he says, like this, gesturing to himself. We’re nearing downtown, and the wind is vociferous against the side of the rented cream sedan. The inside of the car smells of rust and potpourri. So, what’s it like? I ask. To live like that. I’m a little drunk, and I can’t help but think this is remarkably funny, all things considered. To be here, now, in the middle of a windy day in January in the Twin Cities with a monster driving me around town. He huffs, makes a right, and we’re nearing the hotel.

*

I’m in my room he’s put me up in. He’s also paid for my plane ticket to be here. The fog has lifted a bit, and I didn’t realize how cold I was until I was inside. I keep thinking about his talk later, what he’ll say, what he could possibly have to share with the world. And I’m struck again by this sense of humor that has been absent for an indeterminant amount of time. Crystal surely hasn’t seen it. I find this funny, in a sick way. How he landed on his feet, how he has become some kind of horned prophet and people actually pay him to talk about his life, his monstrosity, to leave out all the details of how he got to this point. Then I call Crystal and ask if I can talk to James. After some perfunctory hey buddys and mhms I ask if I can talk to Mommy again. Crystal is back on the phone, and she seems to have lost all her anger. Are you okay? she asks. I’m alright, I say. You sure? she says, deep pleading in her tone. I don’t know, I confess. I’m going to watch him speak. Well, you’ll have to let me know how that is, she says.

*

The fog of drink is gone, but the slight fist in my throat that wants more is there, and I blame him for this. He was the one who bought me my first bottle, who shared it with me. Who let me slurp the last drop of tawny liquid from the bottle when he’d had his fill and watched me wretch over the side of the front porch. Mom was out back smoking a Virginia Slim acting like none of us knew, but we all knew she smoked. I caught her once when I was like eight. It’s nearing 5:30pm Central Time, and he’s made it clear that the talk begins at 7:00pm, and he must be in the convention center ball room attached to the hotel for a host of reasons at 6:00pm. So, I slink out of the room and head to the elevator, thinking I’ll grab a quick cocktail at the hotel bar.

*

While at the bar, Crystal calls. Says James isn’t feeling well. The pain in the sides of my head is intensifying while I’m here in Minneapolis, barely perceptible back home. I miss you, she says. It’s something I’ve been wondering about, to be honest – whether she actually misses me, whether she’s just pissed because I let my father get the best of me again. We get to talking a bit, and I’m rekindled for a moment, grounded, remembering exactly where my space is in this world, where I’m supposed to be, and it’s not here. But I can’t just shake the fog I’ve gotten into, the hypnotic dreamscape of following around my monstrous father. We hang up and I realize I’m late to walk over to the convention center. Outside, I see the first stirrings of snow. After some deliberation. I decide to skip the show and go for a walk.

Out in the cold, the pain on the sides of my head intensifies. I imagine my father on stage, his gigantic head swinging as he talks, weighing him down, how he’s refused to get the surgery after all and is instead capitalizing on this. The custom equipment they’ve had to create to fit around his horns, into his ears, and the way the mic rumbles as he speaks about whatever it is he speaks about. I’ve done some Googling of him in the past, but there’s nothing conclusive. Seems to talk about motivation, living with the monster inside and out, the way we are all the manifestation of some urban legend or another, the ways we can overcome our generational trauma. As if. And I remember the conversation I had with my sister so long ago when she told me he told her they had to come out. Why hadn’t he done it, after all? So, I open my phone and Google him yet again. The talk for tonight is entitled John Holloway: On Redemption and Monstrosity. Tickets were going for $145. Absurd. The cold doesn’t seem to seep through as much as I thought it would, but I feel my hair wettened by the large flakes dancing in the streetlights. It’s nearly 8pm, and the talk is still going, but I keep walking past the monotonous run of silver and grey and black and incongruous heights of building, slinking my way through the vanilla Midwestern splendor toward the stadium. I can hear his voice droning in my head, but I can’t imagine the specifics of his pontification. The only thing I can think about is the few times he tried to calm me down, to teach me, before the horns came in, when he and Mom were still together.

*

Not for the first time, I think It's weird when your parents divorce when you’re an adult. You understand the nuance of adult relationships, the finite nature of how it could all come crashing down due to one mistake, how that’s juxtaposed by the infinite tolerance required to handle a multitude of small injustices. I think about me and Crystal as I take laps around South 6^th St, back to Chicago Ave around U.S. Bank Stadium. What all has she endured for me?

*

Back at the hotel bar I find my father sitting at a seat, his enormous horns drooping and winding. His head moves from side to side as he orders a drink. I stand in the pristine lobby for a moment next to an aquiline fireplace, watching. Crystal texts me. How’s it going? she asks. Fine, I respond. Just grabbing a drink. How was the talk? she sends. Weird, I type. I don’t know why I’m lying, but the thrill of deceit washes over me like drink rushing to the head. I’m suddenly warm, and the pain in the sides of my head sears to the point where I almost drop to my knees. Another text. Can we call? she asks. Sure, I say. We talk briefly. I say goodnight to James, taste the pang of lament in her voice as we hang up. My flight home is scheduled to leave at 10:16am Central. I get the feeling, as the pain has started to dissipate, that I’m sitting up on a balcony watching me do things, as thought I’ve fluttered out of my form and am perched on the verge of an unending repose state – but not quite anything so finite as death. And then I lean into the balcony, will myself back into my body, my head, my hands. I pick up my feet and start walking toward him.

*

Hey, I say, sliding into the seat next to him. He turns silently, huffs in this caprine way. Sorry I missed the talk, I offer. He points to his glass, and the bartender takes it, pours another two fingers of sterling bourbon. I can tell it’s top shelf. My father motions for me to order. Same, I say, pointing at his glass. We pass this way, grimacing. We drink slowly, deliberately, letting the moment build as others carry on around us, their words shimmering on the tips of their tongues. I can see everyone’s teeth so clearly, even as the haze starts to set in. My father’s scent fills my nostrils. Bourbon and shame, something like freshly cut grass and cured tobacco, perhaps stale sweat and burnt sugar. I look outside, and the snow drifts swirl. The car headlights and taillights poking through the incoming storm brewing as they come and go. So, he says, lifting his head so that those obsidian eyes can focus on my own slack face. I’m drifting out of myself again. He has this effect on me. I order another glass. So, I say, lifting up my glass. He laughs, clinks his own to mine. The wind outside picks up, whistling against the glass of the hotel exterior. We get to talking.

*

We’re out walking the town as the wind howls around us, as the snow intensifies. We’re looking for another place to hole up, to keep the conversation going. He’s told me everything about his life, what his talks are about, hypnotized me with his words. I can’t help but hang on them, waiting for the one thing I’ve been waiting for all these years, and we’re drunk, so there’s hope. He walks in great arcs on the sidewalk, his horns gathering snow. He doesn’t even have a jacket on as he barks at me trailing behind that there’s a bar just up the way. I feel my phone vibrate, look up at the swirling whiteness, wonder if I’ll be going home tomorrow, after all.

The place is called Mo and Johnny’s, and it’s dubbed itself a neighborhood favorite. My father says he’s hungry and orders a buffalo chicken sandwich and fries. I wave off the food, ask for a tap list. I check my phone as he continues to drone about what he’s discovered about himself all this time. Crystal wants to know how bad the weather is. Not sure, I text back. I feel myself floating away again as the bartender comes back with a list for me. I order the double IPA and pull myself back into me. My father’s words sharpen. Son, he says. He's never called me son. I look at him, stare at the monster he’s become. His horns end in grotesque points, his eyes have grown wide and dark. His forehead wrinkles inquisitively for a moment, and he flashes his teeth. The canines have an edge to them. Son, he says again, a timbre in his voice I’ve never heard before. Then a guttural rip of his throat as he takes another drink, swallows wrong, and coughs. Once he recovers, he leans back up, claps me on the back with a thunderous hand. I’ve missed you, he says, finally. The truth is I’ve missed him, too, but this won’t do at all. That’s it? I say. He gets up. Hm, he says, closing his eyes and shaking his head after taking another sip of bourbon. He lifts his other hand, clenches it for a moment, and then turns to walk away toward the bathroom. What’s my son’s name? I ask. He huffs, pauses. We doing this now? he asks, not even bothering to turn around. I lower my voice. Just answer the question, I say. My phone is silent. Who are you? he asks, swelling. He’s growing before my very eyes. The bartender looks on in horror, rooted to the spot, unable to move. My father’s form is gargantuan, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. His clothes tearing from his body as he comes into his true self. He sprouts gnarly hair all over. It reeks of piss. He screams at the top of his lungs the same question, and I’m feeling myself floating away just at the critical moment that I meant to stand up to him. The pain in the sides of my head is driving me further from myself, into the ether of memory. I can see James as a toddler wobbling on his legs, little boots on. I can see my father at the wedding, his horns still fresh, then, screaming as he is now about how Barb is part of this family, that I’ll have to fucking get used to it. I can see the stars swimming as I’m lying on my back in the fescue, the back of my head pounding from when he took me down and stood over me. I can see us huddled in my room, his arms around me telling me I’m his best friend. I can see Crystal pounding her fist into a pillow, me sitting in the desk chair with my head in my hands. Who are you? he screams again, his voice getting shrill. He steps toward me, and I hear the rest of the patrons inside running, screaming. The bartender has a phone, now, and I can see his puny mouth saying something. My eyes are back on my father as he comes toward me, lowering his massive, magnificent head.

*

In the hospital, I’m prone. I’m vulnerable, waiting for him to return, waiting for Crystal and James to get here. There were red and blue lights everywhere, a massive pain in my stomach as he ripped me open and stood standing over me. It comes in flashes, in blinding shards. In the hospital I’m desperately alone but still, quiet. I don’t say much. He’d returned to his normal size by the time they hauled him away, his shoulders hunched as the weight of his head seemed to drag him down to the concrete. They had to pour him into the back of the car. The acrid smell of him had dissipated by the time he was just a man with horns again, seething over me. The doctor comes in and tells me I’m lucky that there isn’t more internal damage, that the shock of it all was really the worst of it, that and the mild concussion I got from when my head hit the floor. I don’t say anything in response. The pain in the sides of my head has returned, but it’s more just a nagging bulge, something I’m coming to terms with.

*

Eventually we’re on a flight back, me and Crystal. Her parents are watching James. As we taxi from the tarmac to the runway, I feel her hand on my forearm, feel the small weight of it sneak up to grasp my bicep, a slight squeeze. We’ve not spoken much about what happened, but she’s here as the plane accelerates and we’re airborne. I’m watching the sidereal blocks of suburbs fall in line like text. I’m thinking of James, the way his breath used to frighten me. Crystal takes her hand away, leans back, and shuts her eyes. I know she won’t sleep. I’m looking at the stunning shape of her nose, tracing her eyelashes with my gaze, trying to hold on to the image of her looking at me in the shower when we were younger, before I adopted James, before I’d decided to try and see what it was my father was up to. As the county roads and fields melt away into the whiteness of the winter sky over Minnesota, the sides of my head are burning with pain. I shut my eyes and grind my teeth against it, feeling myself pull away again. But he’s not here, I think. This can’t be. I’m sitting on the balcony of myself watching my corporeal form take its hands and put them gently to the sides of my head. Then the pain stops, and I’m back in my form, feeling my fingers move, tracing the hard, smooth curvature of new growth.

STORY:
Luke Wortley is a writer living in Indianapolis, IN and online. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Cincinnati Review, HAD, The Florida Review, Pithead Chapel, monkeybicycle, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook PURGE (Workhorse, 2022) and the full-length SHARED BLOOD (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2023), both collections of prose poetry. He writes about the contours of bisexual identity growing up in the rural South mixed with Catholic and puritanical Midwestern values, the evolution of fatherhood, and the intersection of longing and memory. 

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ART:
Matthew Austin is an artist & designer from Maryland, he can be reached at www.matthewaustin.net

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Luke about this story!

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