Cicada song rustles beyond the exposed fly screen. Only now, after screeching through the hot hours of the day, are their voices receding with the onset of night. I listen to them as I lie on my bed, in a partial darkness, bathed in the flickering light of the television screen. Dad opens my bedroom door and I turn to look at him. His face, barely visible in the absence of light, is indistinct. Pop, he tells me, has died. All I do is nod and, as the door closes, I return to watching my show. When I walk through the lounge room later on, Dad and my brother are watching reruns and Mum is asleep in bed. "Wasn 't this on last week?" I ask. My brother tells me that it probably was. Sometime after midnight, he and I stand in the bathroom brushing our teeth. I look at him in the reflection and ask if Dad has said anything yet. He raises a finger, leans forward, and dribbles a frothy mouthful into the sink. "Says he can 't sleep." I lean out the bathroom doorway and peer down the hallway. The lounge room lights are off but the bluish-white glow of the television ripples over my father 's face. I see there, painted in bluish-white upon the ridges of my father 's flesh and bone, the shape of my grandfather 's ghastly visage. My brother asks what Pop had looked like when we 'd gone to see him at the hospital a few days earlier. I shrug and say that he 'd been in a pretty bad state. Unshaven and unresponsive. Eyes half-cracked. Mouth agape. Each breath
