The government checks and his mother’s annuity covered it until it didn’t. There was never any left over, and the last few days of some months were tense with Jonathan’s phone lighting up in spasms of his father’s anxiety, hunger, and permanent hangover.

But not until his father died after nearly nine years of the routine, alone in his chair with the TV on and a cigarette burned fully through to the skin, did Jonathan truly understand himself.

When he found his father with his tongue dried to a shriveled leaf-looking thing in his slack open mouth, he’d turned off the TV and switched on the overhead. The smoke-stained glass fixture dribbled yellow light over a room chock-full of junk, and entirely empty of life. And it was Jonathan’s own personal sunrise. In the sudden echo of release, and thirty-two years young, he knew what he was made of.

The burn on his father’s thigh was disgusting—deep and dry by the time Jonathan found him, but a howling blackish red and clean edged. His father clearly hadn’t budged while the cherry seared through the flannel and his skin. He’d never made a single move to save himself. Just as always. No struggle at all.

Jonathan had thrown a blanket into the old man’s lap, and cleared his throat to make room to wedge a sad sound into his voice and called 911 for a pointless ambulance.

Then life moved on.

When Jonathan sold his father’s house, he hired out for all the hot, boring, dirty, splintery work of making the place look as if it had been even a little bit cared for. Out of the crew that came to pressure-wash and repair the deck, Roy was the only one who didn’t look like a criminal. Roy looked like a mess, no mistaking, but not as if he was eyeing up everything that wasn’t nailed down, or as if he was ready to carve a few extra holes into anyone just for the sport of it.

Roy Dorring was a mule—dull, plodding, and reliable in a narrow beast-of-burden kind of way. But the shiniest facet of Roy, as far as Jonathan could care about, was his stubborn insistence on being pathetic. It was a rustle in the grass, a whiff of prey on the breeze. And Jonathan had a stinger, a restless vestigial tail on his personality.

That’s what he’d realized once his parents were gone. He was free, but he couldn’t sink his disapproval into a memory. It didn’t satisfy. It was distracting. He’d been too long without a target, and the venom was backed up in him. Roy drew the barb as if it were his one true calling.