I’m out of town. That’s all I had to say. Sorry mum, it’s work, I’ll visit as soon as I’m home. Then book a one way ticket to Australia and change my name to Silvia.

She’d never know about the three pictures a day I post on Facebook which are clearly from my living room. She’d never know that I’m sitting in all day binge watching Orange Is The New Black, with my hair scrunched up into a bobble, a cup of tea in one hand and the other arm deep in a bag of Doritos, (the chili heatwave kind of course, because the cheesy ones leave your mouth tasting like a badgers armpit for hours), chili dust clinging to the hairs on my forearm. She’d never know I lied.

I know how awkward that must’ve been for you, coming home and finding me how you did. It was for me too.

I’m writing this from what seems to be a box. Eh, it’s a computer. I’m sitting at a computer and now I have to come up with a short story that will win the hearts of its readers.

Yeah, so it was 1973. Yeah, 1973, everyone loves the 70s. This will work. No, it was 2017. Yeah, 2017. Cool. We got the year out of the way.

On a dark summer night in 2017, it was dark like most nights are, and I was fishing. Yeah, fishing. OK, I got it, yeah, I was fishing and there was a bear. A bear. I caught a fucking bear.

“I need a transplant,” Dad said, and before I could even back up my spreadsheet, the old man had tripped over the coffee table and windmilled into my lap.

I’d always thought of my father as a person only in the abstract, of course. But once that cruller-loving flesh bag was slumped across my chair, pinching my carpal-tunnel arm? Well.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Felt dread of something after death—
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Long life—To die, to sleep—No more—
And by a sleep to say we end