Father's Day with Florence

I had the unfortunate experience of remaining not only sober, but conscious, for a decent portion of Father's Day this past weekend. This would not have been such an issue but for the fact that my illegitimate child, Florence, decided to visit me for the first time in 23 years. He usually just sends me an abusive postcard for that one special day in September and carries on about my own denial of his existence. Which I find incomprehensible and refuse to believe he would say such a thing.

But I digress - damn, I digressed again by pointing out that I had digressed - damn, I did it again...

Anyway, my son Florence appeared at the front door of my shack on the morning of Father's Day, but to his surprise, my front door was at the local tip and had not been attached to my lodge for some months, ever since Hurricane Whoreinboots. Making his way from the tip to the door-shaped gap in my shack, Florence announced himself with a hearty holler of 'GOOD DAY FATHER!!!', which gave me such a shock that I dropped my last bottle of whisky to the floor, where it lay in pieces, as broken and finished as my heart. When I looked up I saw my accursed son standing there with his arms full.



It seemed as though my hair-less hippie son had decided that I wasn't being ironic when I named him Florence that fateful day that the nurse cut open his mother, and had become a professional giant-rabbit breeder.

I (begrudgingly) sat my Florence down at the kitchen table and went down to the cellar to find a drink. My cellar is full of not bottles of wine, but model pirate ships. I bought a cargo-load of the ships a few years back from a merchant man from Venice who convinced me that pirates used to make the model ships and hide rum inside the masts so they could drink without the captain noticing. Of course I was yet to find any rum inside any of the toy ship masts. Nonetheless, I grabbed an armful of toy ships and headed back upstairs.

Fixing Florence a glass of Aktavite, I sat with him at the table and listened as he told me about his new life. I was systematically snapping pirate ship masts in two and throwing them away when they turned out to be hollow, when Florence dropped a bombshell. We both looked to the floor to the see the old, flaky remnants of a grenade that had fallen from a hole in his pants pocket. Florence told me he had found the old thing in the field where he bred his monstrous rabbits. I said I didn't care for his theories and he cleaned up the bombshell off the ground.

All this time, the gigantic rabbit Florence had brought with him had been sniffing about my shack. Presently, it returned to Florence and jumped onto his lap. Florence told me the rabbit was my Father's Day gift. I slapped him across the face. He jumped at me over the table and began gnawing at my neck. Florence watched in glee as the rabbit tore away at my neck flesh and eventually I passed out. Which was fine with me. I prefer to spend my Father's Days unconscious after all.