I was coming home from somewhere and it had been snowing. As I approached our house, I saw that there was blood on our front lawn. But not just a light trail from a small wound; a ton of blood, all over, as if there had been a fierce battle there.

I went to the other side of the yard and saw that a giant hole had been dug there, a little over a yard deep, and wide, like a crater. My Dad was lying in it on his back, shovel in hand, blood gushing from a wound on his forearm. I understood that he had hurt himself, tried to ignore it, and lost enough blood to fuck with his brain function, so instead of shoveling snow he had just kept shoveling, in one spot, until he passed out.

I freaked out and brought him inside. My family had just moved to this house and it was old and wasn’t standing up to the weather; the moisture from the snow had caused some of the beams to crack and the roof to leak, and in two places, our bathtub and our piano had sagged and crashed through the floorboards to the story below. There seemed to be nowhere safe to put him.

I was panicking, and my Mom just wiped the blood off of Dad’s forearm and showed me that the wound itself wasn’t that big. As she did that, he snapped into coherence and consciousness, and they joined in making fun of me for worrying too much all the time. I was confused and trying to explain to them that I had a reason to be concerned with that much blood loss, but they waved me off and didn’t seem to notice that the house was collapsing.