Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

says to me, my father, the very father who is dying here in front of me, though today he looks good for someone in his condition, he says, “You’re not yourself today son,” in his best Groucho, winking just in case—and this is a long shot—I take him seriously, “and it’s a great improvement.”
    But I do take him seriously; this is the problem. I stand to go but as I stand he grabs me by the wrist and holds me with a power I didn’t think he had any longer. I look at him.
    â€œI know when I’m going to die,” he says, looking deep into my eyes. “I’ve seen it. I know when and how it’s going to happen and it’s not today, so don’t worry.”
    He is completely serious, and I believe him. I actually believe him. He knows. I have a thousand thoughts in my head but can speak none of them. Our eyes are locked and I’m filled with a wonder. He knows.
    â€œHow do you—why—”
    â€œI’ve always known,” he says, softly, “always had this power, this vision. I’ve had it since I was a boy. When I was a boy I had a series of dreams. They woke me up screaming. My father came to me on the first night and asked me what was wrong and I told him. I told him I’d dreamed my aunt Stacy had died. He assured me that Aunt Stacy was fine and I went back to bed.
    â€œBut the next day she died.
    â€œA week or so later the same thing happened. Another dream, I woke up screaming. He came to my room and asked me what had happened. I told him I dreamed Gramps had died. Again he told me—though with perhaps a bit of trepidation in his voice—that Gramps was fine, and so I went back to sleep.
    â€œThe next day, of course, Gramps died.
    â€œFor a few weeks I didn’t have another dream. Then I did, I had another, and Father came and asked me what I had dreamed and I told him: I dreamed that my father had died. He of course assured me that he was fine and to think no more of it, but I could tell it rattled him, and I heard him pacing the floor all night, and the next day he was not himself, always looking this way and that as if something was going to fall on his head, and he went into town early and was gone for a long time. When he came back he looked terrible, as if he had been waiting for the ax to fall all day.
    â€œâ€˜Good God,’ he said to my mother when he saw her. ‘I’ve had the worst day of my entire life!’
    â€œâ€˜You think you’ve had a bad day,’ she says. ‘The milkman dropped dead on the porch this morning!’”
    I slam the door behind me when I leave, hoping he has a heart attack, dies quickly, so we can get this whole thing over with. I’ve already started grieving, after all.
    â€œHey!” I hear him call to me through the door. “Where’s your sense of humor? And if not your sense of humor, your pity? Come back!” he calls to me. “Give me a break, son, please! I’m dying in here!”

The Day I Was Born
    T he day I was born Edward Bloom was listening to a football game on a transistor radio he had tucked into his shirt pocket. He was also mowing the lawn and smoking a cigarette. It had been a wet summer and the grass was high, but today the sun beat down on my father and my father’s yard with an intensity recalling an earlier time when the sun was hotter, the way everything in the world used to be hotter or bigger or better or simpler than things were right about now. The tops of his shoulders were as red as an apple, but he didn’t notice because he was listening to the biggest football game of the year, the one that pitted his school team, Auburn, against their nemesis, Alabama, a game that Alabama invariably won.
    He thought of my mother, briefly, who was inside the house, looking at the electric bill. The house was as cold as an icebox, but still she was sweating.
    She was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the