paternal instinct

But the saturnine sky had already begun to wane.1

I rested a caring hand on his slightly heaving chest.  The faint drum of machinery in the background, sonorous as the echo of rain on tombstones, pattered on.  White noise.  The nurses hovered, engaged in their profane rituals and obscene gestures, their faces gaudily painted, cheek to cheek, with glittering facades of empathy.  The eyes of my father slowly cracked, proffering white, stagnant eyes.  2

He was a man built for menial work; broad-shouldered, rigid.  His salient jaw rendered a protrusion in his complexion when he frowned.3

“This rooms cold,” his voice stammered in protest.4

“It’s the thermostat…” he continued.  “…On the wall…  Don’t you understand?  You never were a bright one,”  he muttered, with a vehemence galvanized only by mortality.  5

He was a man built with a proclivity for condescension, an insatiable desire for superiority.  A Darwinian monkey, a tourniquet dancing around on a stage amidst thunder and lightning, sound and fury.    6

I relaxed, allowing his voice to drone on in a low monotone.  I was sequestered, immured, by the low voice and the man behind it.  As it intoned on, memories of inadequacy and incompetence circled me, dancing.  I could see it on the faces of the nurses.  7

“You’re weak!”  their faces trilled in giddy delight, as if infatuated with my inferiority.  8

As they danced, faces benighted with sickly evil, I could barely discern the voice, an animated oboe, of my father, from the hum of machinery.  9