world in space women had done the like from
their world ... to this world, alien to both of them. And here a
monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking
fungus--their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together
two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting
terms.

Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father's room.

He slept.

On a chair by his bed lay a copy of _Hamlet_, his favourite
Shakespearean play. I picked it up, read in it, waiting for him to wake,
while he breathed laboriously.

I became absorbed in the play ... I must write a poem, some time, called
"Hamlet's Last Soliliquy."

* * * * *

My father was awake.

I did not know how long he had been so, for his breathing had not
changed and the only difference from his sleeping state was that his
eyes stared, wide and glassy, at the ceiling, as if they comprehended
nothing.

A feeling of horror crept over my body. This was more than I had counted
on.. my father, helpless on his back and his wits off gathering wool....

"Father!" I put my hand on a talon of his.

He turned his head slightly. Smiled vacuously.

"Father!"

A perturbation clouded his eyes ... that painful struggle toward
comprehension observed in an infant's face.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

"I'm your son--Johnnie!... and I've come back to take care of you."

"Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship."

And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled
him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about,
changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs
out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....

"You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is
away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ...
perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor."

He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.

"Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?"

As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me--and he was
quite strong, for all his emaciation--the horror of my situation made me
sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back
to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ...
"that is the only thing you and this man have in common ...
oyster-fries," remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his
wrists in