Anonymous 2026
Conversations with Father
The air in the sunroom smelled of eucalyptus and rubbing alcohol. On the glass table sat a half-empty glass of water, a plastic tray of yellow pills, and a leather-bound Bible with a fraying spine.
Thomas looked at his father. Arthur Vance had once been a man who commanded the attention of thousands from a brightly lit stage, his voice booming through stadium speakers, a charismatic architect of faith and political might. Now, he seemed to be swallowed by his oversized cardigan. His breathing was thin and raspy, a fragile rhythm that was more erratic each week. The doctors called it progressive heart failure; Thomas called it the slow, quiet fading of an empire.
Outside, the afternoon sun cast long shadows across the manicured lawn. The country was quiet today, but it was the silence of exhaustion, not peace. President Hayes’s term had ended just a month ago. Two weeks later, Hayes was dead, a sudden stroke cutting short the chaotic life of a man who had nearly dismantled the republic.
‘You’re staring, Tommy,’ Arthur whispered. His eyes, clouded by cataracts, turned toward his son. ‘I’m still here.’
‘I know, Dad,’ Thomas said, pulling his chair closer. He looked at the old man’s hands, spotted with age, resting on the blanket. ‘I was just thinking about the funeral next week. For Hayes.’
Arthur let out a soft, dry cough that shook his frail frame. ‘A complicated man. But God uses imperfect vessels.’
Thomas felt a familiar, sharp tightening in his chest. For years, he had kept his mouth shut, watching from the periphery as his father’s mega-church network formed an unbreakable alliance with the administration. They had built a machine that blended salvation with nationalism, and in doing so, they had re-engineered the government.
‘An imperfect vessel,’ Thomas repeated, his voice dangerously calm. ‘He didn’t just leak, Dad. He poured poison into the groundwater. And your people handed him the pitcher.’
Arthur shifted, his brow furrowing. ‘We did what was necessary for the soul of this nation. We secured the courts. We protected the faithful.’
‘You broke the country,’ Thomas said, leaning forward, the weight of years of silent observation finally fracturing. He looked into his father’s fading eyes and asked the question that had burned in him since the regime began. ‘What did you hope to gain by having him trying to obliterate the Muslims? And let’s face it, Dad… he failed. The ban, the rhetoric, the registry, it didn’t save anyone. It just broke families.’
Arthur closed his eyes, his breathing shallow. For a moment, Thomas wondered if he had pushed too hard, if his father’s failing heart would give out under the weight of the confrontation. But when the old man opened his eyes, a spark of the old, calculated fire remained.
‘You see a failed policy, Tommy. You look at it like a politician,’ Arthur said, his voice weak but precise. ‘We looked at it like strategists. Hayes was a blunt instrument. We knew he couldn’t eliminate Islam. But by pushing him to try, by making it a holy war in the minds of the voters, we drew a line in the sand. We solidified the base. We made our people realize they were in a battle for survival. Fear is a wonderful glue, son. It bound millions of believers to our movement, because they thought Hayes was the only shield against the infidel.’
Thomas shook his head, repulsed. ‘So the cruelty was the point. It was just a marketing strategy.’
‘It was an alignment,’ Arthur corrected, pausing to take a ragged breath. ‘A realignment of loyalty.’
‘But at what cost?’ Thomas pressed, his voice rising slightly before he checked himself, mindful of the medical monitor humming quietly in the corner. ‘How did the churches gain so much influence over the federal government to the point of people not believing facts, data, and science? I watched your broadcasts, Dad. You had people cheering for the defunding of universities, laughing at doctors during the pandemic, tearing down environmental data. How do you make millions of rational people look at a proven fact and call it a lie?’
Arthur reached out, his trembling fingers tapping the leather cover of his Bible. ‘Because facts don’t offer salvation, Tommy. Data doesn’t give you a purpose in eternity. Science tells you what is, but people desperately want to be told what they mean.’
He paused, swallowing with difficulty. Thomas held the water glass to his father’s lips. Arthur took a tiny sip, nodded his thanks, and sank back into his pillows.
‘We didn’t have to fight the facts,’ Arthur continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘We just had to discredit the gatekeepers. We told our people that the secular world, the scientists, the journalists, the bureaucrats, were biased against God. Once they believed the source was corrupt, they stopped looking at the data altogether. They trusted the shepherd instead of the map. And the federal government? Politicians go where the organised voices are. We had the pulpits. We had the airwaves. We had the money. We could deliver twenty million voters with a single sermon. The government didn’t surrender to us, Tommy. They auditioned for us.’
The raw honesty of the admission felt like cold water. Thomas looked at the man who had raised him, a man who was now standing on the precipice of his own mortality, yet showed no remorse for the intellectual vandalism he had championed.
‘The President lost his mind at the end, Dad,’ Thomas said softly. ‘You know that, right? The last six months in the Oval Office, Hayes was delusional. He was talking to the walls. He was signing executive orders that made no legal sense, running the economy into the dirt, letting the infrastructure crumble while he ranted on television. He ran the country down completely. And you all just… let him go. You watched his head run away from things, and you didn’t say a word. Why?’
A faint, ghostly smile touched Arthur’s pale lips. ‘Because he had already done his job.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The mess he made was structural,’ Arthur whispered, his chest heaving slightly as his energy began to flag. ‘A building must sometimes be cleared out before it can be rebuilt. Hayes shattered the old norms. He broke the secular institutions. And while he was distracting the world with his madness, our people were quietly moving into the spaces he vacated. We placed our judges, our administrators, our school board members. We let him run wild because his chaos was our cover. When his term ended, the old system was too weak to fight back.’
Arthur coughed again, a wet, rattling sound that lasted too long. Thomas stood up, adjusting the pillows, feeling the terrifying lightness of his father’s body. The old man was slipping away, bit by bit, even as they spoke.
As the coughing subsided, Arthur looked up, his expression suddenly vulnerable, the mask of the grand strategist slipping. ‘And now… now the church steps in. The President is gone. His followers are disillusioned, looking for order. The country is crying out for someone to clean up the mess. And who do you think is standing there, ready with food drives, with community leadership, with moral clarity? We are the positive part of the cleanup, Tommy. We let him break it, so we could be loved for fixing it.’
Thomas stared at him, horrified by the grand, cynical design of it all. It was an engineered cycle of crisis and rescue, all designed to consolidate power under the banner of the cross.
Thomas uttered, his voice trembling with an aching grief, not just for his dying father, but for the world they were leaving behind. ‘Why was there so much hate, vitriol, and pain created? The families torn apart by your politics, the violence in the streets, the neighbors turning on neighbors. Why wasn’t it stopped? You had the power to call for peace. You could have told them to love their enemies. Why did you let the hatred burn?’
Arthur’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling, his breathing slowing down, entering a deeper state of exhaustion. The effort of the conversation was taking its final toll for the day. When he spoke, his voice was barely a murmur, stripped of all theatricality.
‘Because love doesn’t build a coliseum, Tommy,’ Arthur whispered. ‘Hatred is the most powerful mobilizing force on earth. It keeps people vigilant. It keeps them angry. And angry people vote. Angry people give money. If we told them to love everyone, they would have stayed home. We needed the fire to melt the old world down.’
‘How did you get so many groups, christian groups, mega churches and their leaders to join in on such a biblical quest?’ mentioned Thomas. Arthur, pointed to the bible. ‘Simple, we are all of the one faith, differing views and so on, but the bible was our fabric, in the background then we were all connected and various people involved in all of the churches had a common goal, to be rid of the things that hold us back, we needed to unify and this was our way to do so. The future looked so good, but who knew that we could have enabled a monster. Still we got somewhere I guess.’
Arthur’s eyes fluttered shut. His hands relaxed on the blanket, the Bible slipping slightly to the side. The steady, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor was the only sound left in the room.
Thomas sat back in his chair, looking at the frail, failing architect of a fractured nation. He realized then that there would be no deathbed confession, no final apology. His father was dying convinced of his own righteousness, leaving his son and millions of others to inherit the ruins of a kingdom built on holy fire and engineered chaos.
Thomas reached out, gently took his father’s cold hand, and sat in the quiet, watching the sun sink below the horizon.
