Buy him a shirt: pale, pressed crisp, avoid a relaxed fit, get him something plain and ordinary like his face, not paisley, never stripes, definitely not checked because I’m no cowboy, Annie, certainly no pastels, definitely no glitter or sequins or tufted collars or feathers or fancy buttons or neon, or one shaped more like a man that would curl his mouth into an uptick of desire when you buttoned his shirt over your sleepy morning flesh, just a bland, square thing with the box-fresh folds still siphoning hope like rain-drowned gutters.

Buy him a pen like the engraved Parker in the velvet-lined box, twenty years of diligent service gone like that with a click of the fingers, not the chewed Biros of the job centre, not a purple glitter gel pen like the one your son used to scribble inky amethysts with before he grew and left and replicated tiny little hims drawing purple hearts on the other side of the world, not a pen that says Hotel Thomas swiped from the bedside table while you were still sighing someone else’s name on a hot breath into illicit afternoons.

Buy him something for gardening: a lawnmower, a hoe, to remind him about outside the walls of the misnomered living room, a water sprinkler system to teach him what it is to pour, pour nourishment onto a thing instead of letting it brown and crisp and crumble, a planter, some seeds, see if he knows what it is to crack open, to grow, to flourish, give him a dandelion clock and blow the ghosted parachuters into his face and see if he reacts to a fleeting brush of feather-over-skin.

Buy him a subscription to Country Life so he can bury himself in the folds of a life never remembered, anemoia incarnate, sweating, dripping bittersweet blood into grasses long dead, those were the days, those simple times that were harder, no—just as hard because it’s always been hard and always will be and so you grab those moments where you feel just a tiny little something in your limbs, your lungs, your labia.

Buy him a watch so he can tick tick through his days, checking when bin men arrive so he can make a stern phone call to the council, so he can complain when you’re home later than you said you’d be, so he can mark out the days until his death in clicking, marching nanoseconds until time is all that’s left and he is dust in an indented bowl in the armchair and you can join him or sweep him onto the carpet.

Buy him a ticket: plane, train, hovercraft, rocket to the moon, it doesn’t matter, destination unknown, irrelevant, but put your name on the ticket instead of his and put your keys on the kitchen bench and crush the present beneath your weighted heels. Kick off your shoes and go barefoot, bury your toes in warm white sand grains, feel a shell, a shard of coral and the delicious agony of you.

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Ⓒ Jay McKenzie