Limitless Evolution As a Snake

They never told anyone I existed. Never claimed me as a grandson, not on paper, not out loud, not once. And when Dad got sick, when the cancer chewed through his pancreas and then his bones and the rest of him, they didn’t send money, didn’t send help, didn’t send anything except cards that arrived after he was already unconscious.

They cut him off financially the day he married her. Still, right up until the machines were breathing for him, he believed they’d come around. He’d talk about reconciliation like it was a business deal still open for negotiation, like enough charm and enough patience would fix twenty years of being erased.

They came around eventually. Just in time to cry over a body that was still, technically, alive.

They sat there in the hospital room, all of them, the aunts with their good coats and the uncle with his watch worth more than my mum’s car, and they cried, they wailed like they’d lost something, like they had any right to grieve a man they spent twenty years pretending didn’t have a wife or a kid. Big dramatic sobs, tissues out. The whole show.

But none of that crying paid the medical bills. None of that wailing touched the mountain of debt Dad had built up trying to keep the shop afloat, trying to keep us afloat, buying cars he couldn’t afford because some part of him needed to prove to his own family that he was doing fine without them, that he didn’t need their money, even when he did, even when we all did. And when the bills came due, when the bank started calling, and the letters started stacking up on the kitchen counter, guess who got blamed. Not Dad. Me and Mum, like we’d been the ones signing off on it. Like we hadn’t been begging him for years to slow down, to stop trying to out-spend a family that would never see him as anything but the son who married beneath his station.

I remember mum on the phone at 2 in the morning, voice gone thin and small, trying to explain to some debt collector that her husband had just died, could they please, please give her a few more weeks. I remember standing in the doorway listening to that and feeling something in my chest go cold and stay cold.

And when he actually died, when the machines finally stopped and the room went quiet in that specific way rooms go quiet when a person isn’t in them anymore, his family moved fast. Faster than grief should let anyone move. They booked the funeral before Mum even had a chance to call his friends from the shop, the men who’d known him thirty years, the ones who used to come round for beers and complain about football. Rushed it through, small venue, closed guest list, like they were trying to bury him before anyone could ask questions.

I had to be the one to tell people. Fifteen years old, standing in front of his friends after the fact, after it was already done, telling grown men that the funeral had already happened and they weren’t invited. Watching their faces crumple, watching them realise they’d been cut out of saying goodbye to a man they loved. That was on me, and nobody warned me I’d have to do that. Nobody warned me at all.

And here’s the part that still sits in my throat like a stone. They knew, for months, they knew he was dying. His mother knew, his brothers knew, some doctor cousin of theirs had access to results we never saw, and they sat on that information. They let us keep spending money we didn’t have on treatments that were never going to work, let us hope, let us drain every last account and remortgage the shop, because telling us the truth would have meant admitting they still cared enough to know. Let Dad think Mum and him could run away together once he was better, saying he didn’t want to be in hospital anymore, that he wanted to be at home with us, at the shop, with the dog.

It was easier to let us bankrupt ourselves chasing a miracle than to say the quiet part out loud. And when he was finally gone, when there was nothing left to hide behind, they turned the whole thing into a fifteen-minute service and a rushed cremation, like grief was an inconvenience to be tidied up quickly before anyone important noticed.

Nobody around me even knew Mum and I existed until I told them. Twenty years of marriage, erased. A whole childhood, mine, erased. Like we were an embarrassing footnote they’d managed to keep out of the family history right up until the day it became impossible to hide the funeral announcement.

I kept my head down after that; I had to, I learned to. Followed orders, didn’t make noise, didn’t ask questions, because asking questions never got me anything except more reasons to be disappointed in people who were supposed to love me.

I shake my head, actual physical motion, scales rasping against the dog bed fabric, like I can shake the thought loose from wherever it crawled out of.

Why am I even thinking about this? It’s been years, a different world and a different body. Different everything.

The system stays quiet for a second, which is new. Normally it’s got something to say about everything, some dry little comment ready to fire off, but this time there’s just silence sitting there in my head like it doesn’t know what to do with what I just handed it.

[System: Oh wow, Matt. I didn’t know that, I really didn’t know that. That’s awful, mate.]

Yeah, well... I don’t really want to talk about it anymore now that it’s out.

[System: Look, if it makes you feel any better, they died not long after. All of them, or most of them anyway. Don’t have details, wasn’t tracking that far back, but yeah. Didn’t last long.]

I don’t know why that’s supposed to help, but it kind of does, a little bit, in some petty small way I’m not proud of.

Thanks for trying to make me feel better, Old Mate.

[System: Yeah, nah, all good. Anyway, shut your eyes; we’ll get into the skill rolls tomorrow. And oi, I’m serious, you’re gonna need to remind me first thing because there is a quest sitting in your log right now that I did not put there; I have no clue who did, and I’ve been poking at it like a bloke who finds a mystery parcel on his doorstep and isn’t sure if he should open it or call the police. The rewards are... mate, juuuuust, sleep you gotta trust me on this one.]