A red night. Brome and Mediterranean grass, spiny native shrubs and shaggy eucalyptus—all are taken by the flames.

Just as children receive blessed snow on Christmas morning, so are fathers blessed this Father’s Day. Every backyard is covered in ash. Flecks lodge in the greased joints of the barbecue. The patio furniture is peppered black and white. The leaves hold solemn palmfuls of the holy silt.

Fathers across the world rise early and on their minds is domestication. One dad, anticipating a pancake breakfast, surveys his backyard under the rising of a bloody sun. He stands at his sliding glass door and absently swallows heartburn pills. He cranes his neck, left to right, taking in the damage—the opportunity. He O’s his thin lips and exhales a vaguely sexual grunt. “I better go to the garage,” he mutters.

Another pop is eating soggy scrambled eggs when he hears the drone: Could it be— At this hour?

He goes to the window, peeks past the curtain; he throws it back; he dashes to the kitchen window, and it is true, yes: The world is ash.

“Oh yeah. Oh fuck yeah!”

His plump infant son looks up, a blob of Greek yogurt obscuring half his mouth. His berobed wife pauses before a sip of coffee.

“You see this?”

“I could smell it,” his wife says, “It looks like there was a fi—”

Off pops pop’s shirt. His beer belly sways behind the rest of his movements, languid. He lumbers toward the closet and digs out an old paint-spattered shirt. A gardening shirt. A work shirt.

He stumbles from the garage armed with a $450 John Deere Premium Leaf Removal System—bought on sale on Black Friday after camping out all night in a $999 Coleman ManCave Luxiri-tent.  “Carlos,” he calls over his fence to the dad—dads—next door. The couple usually makes him wary in a way he cannot and would not ever verbalize. Not today. Today, he envies that relationship of men.

In any event, they do not hear him—already the air is calcifying with the mind-scrubbing drone.

Tim and Carlos whip out a matching set of CAT Leaf Obliterators, limited edition yellow plaid with chrome trim—easily $750 each. A chorus of daddy lookie-loos hollers over the ill-sized fences:

“Nice.”

“Nice.”

“Bitchin!”

“Not too shabby. Not too shabby at all!”

None of it is heard. Never again will a proper sound be heard.

The fathers wheel around their yards, feeling the rumbling power in their hands and guts. Ash ascends. All problems are dispersed, blown away, with a good, solid piece of American machinery. The men are quite pleased, light again on their feet after so many years of plodding steps. To and fro they spin, they waltz, they dance. Ten thousand thousand leaf blowers in primal lupine chorus. They nod across the fences and shout unheard encouragement and cough in air soiled by particulate.

The fathers spin, and from their ears crawls blood; it slithers down their cheeks like silken centipedes. Their eyes swell and cloud. Their mouths hang slack, dry and foreboding as the desert, and their laughter is lost in the din. They spin and howl.

From behind glass, children scream, hands tearing at their ears. The sun is gone. A pulsing hum crosses the earth, and the world reaches a resonance. Fire bursts from the ground; chasms open; cyclopean volcanic belches hurl entire cities into the sea, into the mist of ash.

Wives and lovers, crawling on all fours, attempt to tear leaf blowers from stony grasps, to beg and reason, but the corrupted air has sapped their strength and melted their resolve. It matters not. Even if the blind, slobbering fathers could see, the carnage would not stop, they would not stop.

Fire consumes.

The world is ash and quiet. A few huddle in caves, at the furthest reaches, at the lucky places untouched by the resonance. In settling smog, they see the obscured devastation. Fathers crouch in silty circles, talking, whispering.

They lament the chaos, sheepishly. Some hide the rawness of their hands. It is suggested that, perhaps, all of this was providence. The past was swept away for something new, a second chance, a chance at something better.

They lay down plans to rebuild a civilized civilization, one fair and right from the start. Where good men are good dads. A civilization of compassion and candid consideration, where every man, woman, and child, every class, creed, race, and sexual orientation, is free to pursue happiness and decency, to love and to speak their mind, to make real that beautiful American promise, and to own a leaf blower.