November 21, 2020.

Since your dad wasn't in the picture any more, your uncle Phil (your mom's little brother) taught you about baseball and cars and how to shave. He gave your mom money when her double-shifts at JC Pennys couldn't pay for rent and utilities that month. When you broke your arm diving away from a runaway Mazda in 2002 he brought over the Godfather box set and watched all three movies with you and quoted all the lines along with them and had a very fine time.

Your family doesn't really talk to Phil any more, since last Christmas when he said all those horrible things to Auntie Jeanne, but you go over to his house anyway, since it's Thanksgiving. You bring him a big plate of food, secreted away from the small group you have celebrated with.

You're wearing a mask, but you know what he's said on social media about them so you take it off before entering his house. He hasn't left the house since June and so it's very unlikely he'd have Covid.

***

Things started off reasonably enough, good-to-see-yous and how-ya-doins. He seemed in good humor, very happy to see you. He even looked like he used to. Maybe a little thinner.

You avoided most of the potholes. Even when he obliquely brought up the election, spitting the words and "Scorecard" and "Hammer" with a resentment usually reserved for war criminals, you were able to change the subject with a lively description of what Grandpa Ron considered good food (Phil always loved cooking for your family, back when he was still allowed, and he and Grandpa Ron always used to get into lively rows about it) and you had a pleasant enough discussion about stuffing, potato gratin, canned vs. fresh cranberry sauce.

It all fell apart when you asked when he was going to respond to your move in Words With Friends. It had been a few months since you'd played, you thought it was a harmless enough joke. Stupid. Stupid.

It spilled out of him: Facebook and Twitter, Zuckerberg and Dorsey, you know, have been censoring free speech, so he left both. He'd migrated to Parler, where there's a free exchange of ideas, he explained, all sorts of ideas. He'd been educating himself, and learning a lot.

He told you how, despite what they might believe, the mainstream media can't call an election. He told you, gleefully, how Trump is intentionally setting up election court cases that he will lose or get tossed out by corrupt luciferian judges in order to stop the certification, so that Sidney Powell has time to "release the Kraken," a phrase that he mentioned several times but never explained. You gather through context clues that the "Kraken" is some sort of court evidence. "Enjoy the show," Phil advised you, winking. "Oh," you said, not sure how he wanted you to respond. "Okay, thank you."

He told you about the Biden Crime Family, which is a narrative so complicated you are unable to follow any of the many interlocking and convoluted threads. Hunter Biden is a crackhead, and a sex predator a... war criminal? A mob boss or something? There's a laptop? There's a photo of Hunter's penis that Phil is especially incensed about, despite it sounding more like Hunter was wronged by having nude photos stolen and posted publicly for political reasons. Something about China, or Russia, maybe? What was clear was that Phil thinks almost everybody is a pedophile. You chewed slowly on a dry piece of turkey breast so that you had a reason not to engage him on this subject.

You told him how nice the Thanksgiving decorations he has up are, even though there's not many of them, but it's clear he'd put in an effort.

He told you how there's a clause in the constitution that explains if a presidency is interfered with the president is allowed to run for a third term, and that Trump had been playing 5-dimensional chess and allowing the news of his "loss" to spread so that he can gain constitutional ground to invoke this rule. You asked him what clause, specifically, this refers to, but he was already ignoring you and moving on.

He told you that Dominion servers were raided by the US Army, winking once more and saying "military grade," which doesn't mean anything to you. He told you about how Tucker Carlson is on the Comet Ping Pong VIP list and the Globalists are secretly funding wars overseas in order to create refugees that flee to western countries and destabilize Western Values, so they can create the New World Order. He tried to show you this on his phone but the video wouldn't load right.

Once he started showing you his gun collection, his crates full of soft-point ammo, explaining how in the upcoming war he could defend his home by blossoming them inside the skulls of any BLM or Antifa rioters that set a toe over his property line, wherein he brought up both V For Vendetta and the Matrix and a shitty 90s movie called White Squall, you made an excuse, another plate you had to deliver to someone, and left.

He will text you a few days later, asking if he can send you some videos, but you will ignore the texts.

The man you know, you loved, is gone, his thoughts blisteringly dark and scared, his mind soft and spongy and rotten, and in two years he will ingest a bleach-based disavowed cancer treatment, he will die alone, vomiting blood and bile, and no one will find his body for four months.