A Conversation With Father

Anonymous 2026

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 kept his eyes locked on his father. Arthur Vance had once been a man who commanded the attention of thousands from a brightly lit stage, his arms flung wide under stadium lights, a charismatic architect of faith and political might. Now, he seemed to be swallowed by his oversized cardigan. He shifted on the recliner, the movement triggering a sharp beep from the medical monitor overhead. His breathing was thin and raspy, a fragile, shallow rhythm that grew 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.

‘You’re staring, Tommy,’ Arthur whispered. His eyes, clouded by cataracts, slowly tracked toward his son. He reached out a trembling hand, trying to smooth a wrinkle in the blanket. ‘I’m still here.’

‘I know, Dad.’ Thomas pulled his wooden chair closer, the legs scraping loudly against the tile floor. He reached down and gently folded the old man’s age-spotted hands together on the blanket, a forced gesture of comfort. ‘I was just thinking about the funeral next week. For Hayes.’

Arthur let out a soft, dry cough that shook his frail frame. He closed his eyes, his head sinking deeper into the pillow. ‘A complicated man, but God uses imperfect vessels.’

Thomas felt a familiar, sharp tightening in his chest. He stood up abruptly, the sudden movement causing Arthur’s eyes to snap open. For years, Thomas had kept his mouth shut, walking the periphery of his father’s mega-church network while they formed an unbreakable alliance with the administration. They had built a machine that blended salvation with nationalism, re-engineering the government from the pulpits down.

Thomas walked to the glass table, his fingers tracing the frayed spine of the Bible. ‘An imperfect vessel,’ he repeated, his voice dangerously calm. He picked up the plastic pill tray, letting the yellow capsules rattle sharply against the plastic. ‘He didn’t just leak, Dad. He poured poison into the groundwater.’ He dropped the tray back onto the glass with a loud clack. ‘And your people handed him the pitcher.’

Arthur’s brow furrowed, and he tried to push himself up higher against the pillows, his elbows shaking under the strain. ‘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 over the guardrail of the medical bed, forcing his father to look up at him. The weight of years of silent observation finally fractured. ‘What did you hope to gain by having him try to obliterate the Muslims?’ Thomas slammed his palm against the bedframe, a sudden sound that made the heart monitor skip a beat. ‘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 chest hitching. For a moment, Thomas froze, his hand hovering over the emergency call button on the wall, wondering 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.’ Arthur raised a single, shaky index finger to silence him. His voice was weak but precise. ‘You look at it like a politician. We looked at it like strategists. Hayes was a blunt instrument. We knew he couldn’t eliminate Islam. But by pushing him to try…’ Arthur gripped the edge of the blanket, pulling it tight against his chest. ‘…by making it a holy war in the minds of the voters, we drew a line in the sand. We solidified the base. Fear is a wonderful glue, son.’ He tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘It bound millions of believers to our movement, because they thought Hayes was the only shield against the infidel.’

Thomas recoiled, stepping back until his spine hit the glass door leading to the patio. ‘So the cruelty was the point. It was just a marketing strategy.’

‘It was an alignment,’ Arthur corrected. He gasped, his lungs straining for oxygen, his hand fumbling blindly toward the side table. ‘A realignment… of loyalty.’

‘But at what cost?’ Thomas pressed, crossing his arms tight against his chest, 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.’ Thomas paced to the window, turning his back on the old man. ‘You had people cheering for the de-funding 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’s trembling fingers dragged across the bedside table, tapping the leather cover of his Bible. ‘Because facts don’t offer salvation, Tommy. Data doesn’t give you a purpose in eternity.’ He tapped the book harder, his fingernail scratching the leather. ‘Science tells you what is, but people desperately want to be told what a thing means.’

Arthur paused, his jaw working silently as he swallowed with immense difficulty. Thomas sighed, stepping back to the bed. He reached for the water glass, slid his hand behind his father’s fragile neck to support him, and held the rim to the old man’s lips. Arthur took a tiny, desperate sip, a bead of water escaping the corner of his mouth and running into his collar. He nodded his thanks, and Thomas let him sink back into the pillows, setting the glass down with a heavy thud.

‘We didn’t have to fight the facts,’ Arthur continued, his hand reaching out to clutch Thomas’s sleeve, pulling his son down into 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.’

Arthur released Thomas’s sleeve, his hand dropping limply onto the mattress. ‘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 admission felt like cold water. Thomas stared down at his father, refusing to look away, watching the man who was now standing on the precipice of his own mortality show absolutely no remorse for the intellectual vandalism he and others had championed.

‘The President lost his mind at the end, Dad,’ Thomas said softly, dropping back into his chair and leaning his elbows on his knees. ‘You know that, right? The last twelve 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.’ Thomas gestured toward the window, at the quiet, fractured country outside. ‘He let the infrastructure crumble while he ranted and raved 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. He let his head roll to the side, looking toward the ceiling. ‘Because he had already done his job.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The mess he made was structural,’ Arthur whispered. His chest began to heave violently as his energy flagged. ‘A building must sometimes be cleared out before it can be rebuilt. Hayes shattered the old norms. He broke the secular institutions.’ Arthur’s hands twitched against the blanket, mimicking the tearing down of a structure. ‘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 exploded into a violent cough, a wet, rattling sound that lasted too long. Thomas sprang up, instantly adjusting the bed’s mechanical incline and smoothing the pillows. As he lifted his father’s shoulders, he winced at the terrifying lightness of the old man’s body, he felt like paper and brittle wood. The old man was slipping away, bit by bit, right in his hands.

As the coughing subsided, Arthur looked up. His fingers gripped Thomas’s wrist with surprising, desperate strength, the mask of the grand strategist slipping away to reveal sudden vulnerability.

‘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.’ Arthur squeezed Thomas’s wrist tighter. ‘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 slowly pried his father’s fingers off his wrist, staring at him in horror. The grand, cynical design of it all was laid bare, an engineered cycle of crisis and rescue, all designed to consolidate power under the banner of the cross.

‘Why was there so much hate, vitriol, and pain created?’ Thomas’s voice trembled, and he buried his face in his hands, shaking with an aching grief, not just for his dying father, but for the world they were leaving behind. ‘The families torn apart by your politics, the violence in the streets, the neighbours turning on neighbours. 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 away, focusing blankly on the ceiling. His grip relaxed completely, his hands sliding off the blanket as his breathing slowed down into a deep, heavy exhaustion. The effort of the conversation had taken its final toll. When he spoke, his jaw barely moved, his voice a flat murmur stripped of all theatricality.

‘Because love doesn’t build a coliseum, Tommy,’ Arthur whispered. ‘Hatred is probably the most powerful mobilising 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.’

‘One thing I always wondered,’ asked Thomas, ‘Why didn’t the churches just change the bible, leave out all the bad ‘stuff’ and stay positive, there are lots of sections where it says to do bad things all in the name of the Lord? It’s clear that those bad things aren’t actually done these days, so create a fresh new positive guide for people to turn to…’

Arthur Smiled, ‘Well one day the ‘powers that be’ might want to come back to those things and resurrect them. Who knows. However it’s a nice thought and you are not the first to think of that. Log on to my computer, there’s a folder at the bottom right on the main screen, it’s called AX, take a look, I think you will find some useful material there.’

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 realised 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.