Dad had a hole in his head

I'm not sure which was weirder.

The fact that dad had a hole in his head or the fact that he was so unimpressed with it.

Dad had come home from his job at the steel mill, just as he had a thousand times. We heard him sit his hard hat by the door as he stripped out of his jumpsuit before coming to dinner. Mom had meatloaf on the table with potatoes and peas, dad's favorites, and we waited patiently for him to arrive just like always. If this sounds weird to you, that's because it should. Dad had a strange idea that he should go to work, that mom should stay home and keep the kids, and that everything should be like an episode of Leave it to Beaver when he got home. I remember for a while that mom would meet him at the door with a cold glass of beer when he came home, but eventually, dad told her to stop, so the dust from the mill didn't get on her.

It was odd, but dad paid the bills, and that's just how he liked it, so that's what we did.

Mom had gotten half of her welcome home greeting out before it curdled in her throat. My brother had already seen it, but I was still looking at the TV around the corner and hadn't seen it yet. MTV was playing a song by a band I liked, and I looked up to ask Mom if I could use the bathroom when I noticed Dad's head.

Dad, meanwhile, had sat down at the table like nothing was a miss, opening his napkin and putting it on his lap. He was hungry from his day at work, and he had started asking us about our day when he saw how horrified we looked.

"What?" He asked, "What's the matter?"

All three of us were speechless for a moment. How did he not realize what had us all so gobsmacked? Surely he had to feel that. He had to realize what had happened to him. There was no way that a person could be oblivious of something like that.

In the center of Dad's forehead was a hole big enough to stick your pinky finger into. It wasn't like a wound. Wounds usually bleed or appear red or scabby. This one was simply a black hole in his forehead. The edges looked a little ragged, but that more reminded me of a hole that someone had drilled into the pavement.

As strange as the hole was, the fact that it didn't seem to have an exit point was even stranger.

"Hunny," mom asked, trying to be diplomatic about the situation, "did something happen at work today?"

"No," Dad said, looking at her speculatively, "Well, Stubbins had changed the no-slip grating on the walkways, but that's not really weird."

"Are you sure? Nothing odd happened today? she asked, trying to tiptoe around the matter so she didn't upset him.

Sometimes, Dad could have a temper, and none of us wanted to see it.

"I guess maybe,” he seemed to think about it, “there was that guy I bumped into on the sidewalk. I fell down and he helped me up but, it was nothing.”

When she continued to look at him skeptically, he set his fork down angrily and glowered at her.

“Look, Martha, if you have something to ask, then just go ahead and ask it. I'm trying to eat here."

"Dad, there's a huge hole in your head."

I was never what you'd call subtle.

Dad wrinkled his eyebrows at me, "What the hell are you talking about?"

"There is a big hole in your forehead. How do you not feel that?"

"Are you trying to be funny? Cause you know, I don't like jokes."

Despite his gruff tone, he began feeling around his forehead as if trying to find the source of our discomfort. He seemed half-hearted like he was just doing us a favor by looking in the first place, but when his fingers touched the ragged edges of the hole, he shuddered a little. I didn't think it was a hurt shudder, not really. It was more like the shudder you get when you find an itch and scratch it. He inspected it with his fingers for a moment before getting up to look at it in the bathroom mirror. The three of us hovered just outside the door as he looked at it in the mirror, and we must have looked like some old comedy routine as we waited for his prognosis.

After a few minutes of poking and prodding at it, he finally turned away and walked past us, leaving us just standing in the hallway.

We found him at the kitchen table, eating his dinner like any other night.

"Sit down," he told us once he noticed we were there, "your mother's meatloaf is getting cold."

Dad," I started, but mom put a hand on my shoulder.

"Harold, there's a hole in your head. Don't you think we should go to the hospital?"

Dad turned his emotionless gaze on her, making it clear that he didn't want to talk about it.

When we didn't move, he growled in his throat in a deeply phlegmy way, "Doctor would just poke at it and charge me an arm and a leg. Not goin to no doctor. Now sit down and eat."

He went back to eating, ignoring us until we returned to the table and began eating again.

We all tried not to notice the hole as we ate, but it was hard to ignore.

As we sat and watched tv that night, the tv screen seemed to reflect off that dark hole. Mom laughed every time the audience did, but dad never laughed. Well, that's not true. Dad did this thing when he found something funny, one part chuckle and nine parts phlegmy rumble. When I was a kid, I had asked mom once why dad never laughed or smiled, and she had told me that he laughed often and smiled daily.

"It's just harder to tell with your father. He's not quite as obvious about it as we are."

After that, I started paying more attention to dad, and I had come to a point where I could pick up on the subtle twitches at the corners of his mouth, the gravely rumbles when he chuckled, the minute crinkling at the edges of his beetle black eyes. They helped me tell when my dad was in a good mood, when he felt less like hitting and more like patting, when you could maybe ask him for a favor, and when it was best to leave him alone. It was a talent my younger brother never learned, and it was a mistake that often earned him a cuff across the back of the head when he'd try to hit dad up for money.

Dad was enjoying the byplay tonight as Rayromon bemoaned everything from his mother to his job, but my mind was still firmly fastened on the hole. As I watched it, I almost fancied that I could see it expand and retract as though it were breathing. I told myself it was the light from the tv, but the longer I watched, the surer I became that it was moving. It was like a ragged mouth, pulling in and pushing out air. It was subtle, like my father's moods, and the longer I watched, the more apparent it became.

When my father turned his gaze on me, I realized he had caught me staring.

"Either go to bed or stop staring at me. You're creeping me out."

I pushed off the love seat and went to my room.

I knew I wouldn't be able to focus on anything as long as that hole was on display.

The next few days were uneventful, but I noticed that Dad started wearing a hat when he went out somewhere. I wished he would wear one inside, too, because the hole seemed to always be watching me whenever I was around him. It wasn't, of course, because it didn't have any eyes, but I could feel that itchy feeling you sometimes get when someone is staring at you. It looked like it was getting bigger too, but if it pained Dad, he didn't say anything about it. He mostly ignored it, his only exception to ignorance being the hat he wore outside. Dad was stubborn, but he wasn't foolish.

Dad was a sensible person who liked to keep attention off himself.

Over the next ten days, the hole got noticeably bigger.

When we'd first seen it, I could have maybe put a finger inside it. Now I could have easily put several in there, and still, he refused to go to the hospital. Mom tried to coax him, but he said it wasn't worth bothering a doctor over.

"If it was bad, it would hurt, and it doesn't. If it's meant to go away, then it'll do it on its own."

He went to work, came home, watched TV, and all the time, that hole continued to grow. I found myself looking at my father more and more often, that gaping chasm seeming to look at me even through his hat when he wore it. I started dreaming about that hole, and in my dreams, it oozed and bled, and a single eyeball rolled around and looked at me. No matter what Dad was doing in the dream, that eye stared at me until I came awake gasping.

Then, one day, he came to breakfast, and the hole had taken in his eyebrows.

It wasn't a hole now. It was more like a pit, a crater, that just so happened to sit in the middle of my father's head. Mom was left with an egg halfway to her mouth as she stared into that gaping void. We could all see it breathing now, the push and pull of its respirations as it drew in its terrible breath. Dad sat, eating his own eggs and grits, pretending that nothing was wrong, but it was clear that he felt it too. He refused to answer any of us when we called his name and left for work with only half his breakfast eaten.

I noticed that when he came home from work that day, there was a different hard hat on the table in the entryway.

The Hard hat had a slant to it and would better cover the hole.

Dad may act like nothing was wrong but I couldn't. I started avoiding him. I would come down for breakfast after I knew he had gone to work. I would make excuses to stay out so I could miss dinner. I did any number of other things to avoid being in the house, but it hardly seemed to matter. I had begun to hear some kind of whispering as I lay in bed at night, and it permeated my dreams as the eye inside began to whisper words I couldn't understand. The words were alien, harsh, and unwantable, but I felt I knew their meaning.

My sleep became as ragged as my father's moods, and if I hadn't been barely into my senior year of high school, I think I'd have moved out.

Then, about a month and a half after the spot appeared, Dad didn't come down for breakfast.

Mom told us that Dad wasn't feeling well. She said he must have gotten sick in the night, but the way her eyes looked told me something beyond sickness was at play. He didn't go to work that day, and, unknown to us, he would never go back to work again. Mom moved into the guest bedroom, and I wouldn't find out till later that it was because Dad locked the door and wouldn't let her in. We could hear him in there as he bumped around. Mom would leave his food in the hallway, but we never saw him take it.

This went on until one morning when I forgot my notebook upstairs.

I had been heading to school, leafing through my bag, when I realized I had forgotten my biology notebook. I had a test that day and wanted to study before class. I was halfway up the stairs when I heard the door to my parent's bedroom open. I stopped halfway up, not sure whether I should continue or not. None of us had seen Dad since he went into hiding, and my brother and I had been very curious about what had happened with the hole. I put my fingers on the carpet and scampered slowly up the stairs, peeking over the edge of the stairs as I heard the scrape of silverware being bumped. I could see my dad's back, clad in a robe and knee socks, as he bent over the day's breakfast tray that mom had left for him. He seemed to be having trouble grabbing it, and his hands threatened to knock over the juice that sat beside the bowl of oatmeal.

Then he stood, and I had to put a hand over my mouth as his head came into view.

The top of his head looked like nothing so much as one of those cartoon holes that they use to trap each other. It was a swirling black vortex that looked a mile deep, and as he turned to go back into the room, I could see the hole was like some kind of optical illusion. It was exactly as deep on the other side as I was on the back. He turned and took the tray back into the bedroom, but when he bumped the tray on the corner of the door, I realized why we had heard him banging around so much the last few days.

In my dreams, the hole always had an eye, but in reality, it had stolen my father's sight.

The dreams became different after that.

Every night, I dreamed that my family was eating around the breakfast table. My brother sat to my left, and mom sat to my right. Dad sat across from me, bent over his breakfast as usual. They all sat eating food from a massive pile, their breakfast more like a buffet. I seemed to be the only one paying attention to the strange creature wearing my father's clothes, and the food he ate was pushed into the circling hole atop his head.

As I watched, the eye emerged again, but it wasn't alone this time.

The eye was in a face, and the face was long and terrible.

The skin was tan and leathery, like a hide left in the sun too long. The hair was white and fine like a corpses. Its teeth were jagged and yellow, its eyes the cataract threads of the chronically blind, and when his face rolled around to look at me, I would shake as its lips rose into an almost comical grin. As everyone ate, the mouth opened, and a low whispering began to assault my ears.

Every night that whisper became a little louder, and over time I came to understand the words.

Shally Shally may rae

Forie Forie may graw

Le Roly gray ga

Su Roly dray ma

The words slid into my ear like slugs, coating my brain in the forbidden knowledge they possessed. I wasn't sure what the dreams meant, but I knew they were meant for me. Was this the thing that had been staring at me all this time? Was this the reason I had felt watched?

As the dreams continued, I began humming or reciting the words it spoke to myself during my day. I would catch myself making little rhymes out of them, and they were never far from my mind. It was almost soothing to speak those words, a balm to the terrible dreams and the terrible fear that wormed its way through my mind. I knew what it wanted me to do, and one night, I did my part.

I needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, my bladder full to bursting. I was leaving the bathroom when I noticed that the door to my parent's room was open for the first time in a while. There was a noise coming from inside, and it sounded pained. I thought maybe one of the dogs had gotten in there and gotten hurt, but I think even then, I knew what I would find.

Dad was on the ground, his swirling head practically hyperventilating as it pulled in and out. The swirls had taken in Dad's shoulders and the top of his chest, and he was lying on the floor and flopping around as his arms protruded from the vortex. I reached down and helped him sit with his back to the bed. He couldn't talk, probably couldn't even see, but he seemed to understand that I was here to help him.

As I looked at the swirling mass, though, I felt the words come to my lips.

I don't know if they were intentional, but I know they were the words that needed to be said.

Shally Shally may rae

Forie Forie may graw

Le Roly gray ga

Su Roly dray ma

As the words fell from me, I saw something swirling in the mass of shadows. I was worried it would be a huge eye like the one I'd seen in my dreams, but I was even more afraid that it would be the ancient face that I often saw amidst the vortex. As it swirled and thrummed, I could see the white hair beginning to sprout from the depths. The head was coming on fast, and as those eyes emerged from the depths, I could see the corners cast up in a smile. My shaky legs took me away from him with small stuttery steps. His face came free of the murk, but it wasn't done yet. As his head slid free, a withered form emerged beneath it. He was naked, looking like some kind of wizened mummy as his leathery skin slid out of that dark pool. Below the black pit that was my father's head, his body began to shrivel up like a fourth of July firework, becoming blackened embers before my eyes. The more of that evil thing that came free, the less of him there was, and when his withered feet touched down onto the soft carpet of my parent's bedroom, what remained of my father simply blew away.

The old man reached down for the grubby bathrobe that Dad had been wearing and tittered as he pulled it around himself.

"Took you long enough, but I guess I can't be too upset. You and your father have served me well, though you never realized you were doing it. Your reward is not sharing in his fate. Your punishment is knowing you are responsible for my return to this world. What you do with these gifts is up to you."

He left then, just walked out of our house and into the night.

As the sun comes up over mom's kitchen, I realize I've been writing this since I managed to get back to my feet and walk shakily down the stairs. I've been trying to write down as much of my experience as possible, so I won't forget any of it, but it's so weird that it's hard to put it all in words. What the hell was that thing that ultimately killed my father? Did it make the hole in his head? Why him?

As I sit here watching the sun come up, I realize I may never know.