Dad Jokes
(253 words)
Christmas is tough this year.
Dad used to be an important man: the Chair of Temporal Neuroscience at MIT.
Brilliant. Funny.
Now, he’s lonely. Confused. Talking about unregulated time travelers stepping on butterflies in the past and changing the timeline.
Crazy. Not funny.
He’s making me regret dragging my only son, Chris, back to Boston for the holidays.
Dad says he sees the changes—reality updating in real time.
That was his focus at the Institute. His obsession. Before his colleagues politely, quietly asked him to leave.
“I can perceive it, you see,” he says, loading up his plate with turkey. “It’s tied to the active temporal lobe of intelligent people and underactive ventral striatum of people with a good sense of humor. People like me. When the former ages, it takes these people a little longer to internalize the changes as they occur . . .”
He looks at Mom’s empty chair.
He says that’s why he asks where Mom is. Why he’s always asking where I put the medal for a Nobel Prize he never won.
Why none of his jokes are funny or even make sense.
“Dad.” I speak softly, as he passes the turkey. “You’re scaring Peter.”
“Peter?” He looks confused. Sad.
He sighs.
“Maybe I am losing it.” He chuckles. “If I wasn’t, someone would have gone back and sent Hitler to art school already, right?”
“I don’t get it,” Peter, my youngest, whispers. “Dad, who’s Hitler?”
I smile and stroke my son’s head. “I don’t know, sweetie.”
David Lee Zweifler (he/him) spent years in places like Jakarta, Hong Kong, and New York City, working in journalism and other less-dignified pursuits. Now, he spends his days sowing the seeds of his own demise in technology communications. By night, David writes speculative fiction, currying favor with the robot overlords and old gods. David has recent work in The Saturday Evening Post, Analog, and Nature Futures, and is currently querying his first novel. You can connect with David at davidleezweifler.com.
