the house is completely silent while spencer makes his way from the kitchen to the living room. the television made circa 1998 is dead from static and so is the rest of the room. the video games have been played, the music listened to. he and his sister have done their growing and all that's left is a material structure encasing the memories of a family that once lived here. he looks around to the walls surrounding him, placing names to nearly every single face in all the portraits. it's an easy feat. he's heard the stories from his dad a million times before. thoughts remain on a mother long since passed as the recliner is approached. its brown leather is cracked, worn in places the same body has molded to for years. the furniture is another relic of what once was, like a safe haven and comfortable retirement for an older man who spent years earning a living off of hard labor.

spencer grabs the dell's best "all easy crosswords" puzzle book and flips through the pages quickly. only half of its contents remain unsolved, but it's enough. he makes his way back through the room and into the hallway. the door is open and what can be seen first is the light of the sun outside filtering through the delicate curtains that are thin, loose, and peach colored. they were his grandmother's at one time, a sort of heirloom he's sure to inherit sometime soon. he hears his father before he sees him, the death rattle louder than the machine being used to help him breathe. if spencer lets himself wander just enough to pull away from the situation, he can almost imagine that it is the snore of a healthier version of the guy 10 years before.

today is the five-hundred and sixty-fourth day since the surgery. as he stands beside the hospital bed that has long since replaced the old king sized bed he had known all his life, spencer thinks on his father and the time he has left here. "pops? i got you the puzzle book you asked for." the old man is asleep. he's been sleeping the entire morning. there is a stirring, enough so that spencer is able to wake him up and let him know he has his puzzles for the afternoon. it's hard to watch the man go through the paces of clearing out his chest. his throat must be raw, because when he pulls the cotton cloth away from his mouth, there are flecks of blood against the clean white. every day that passes, more and more of the man's dna gets left behind like that. his cough is never quiet, always loud and desperate for more power.

the old man maintains a constant need for more oxygen because of it. the only problem is the more he breathes, the more the death rattle kicks up. the louder the death rattle becomes, the closer spencer gets to full realization that this is the end.