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fiction

Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice…

  28th September 2008  —  Issue 150
I haven't seen my father in three years. But with my writer's block and looming deadline, he's come to visit at the worst possible time

My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter’s keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem—perhaps the best I’d ever written. When I woke, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.

“What time is it?”

“Hello, Son,” he said in Vietnamese. “I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened.”

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