I was reading Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener, about the death of his father he calls a fiction. I thought again of the phone call in my sister's kitchen, dad telling me You're talking to a dead man. I think I laughed, nervously. He said it just like a set up for a joke, with that suspended expectation. Just a punch line hanging in telephonic space. I see myself receiving, by the stove, on a land line, in the kitchen of a row house built in the sixties. And that's all I can recall. What can I say to a dead man talking. Nothing. I'm still here, just listening nervously.