You keep writing in the second person. Why do you keep doing this? I keep writing in the second person. Why do I keep doing this? Interesting, how a shifting pronoun can turn a question into an accusation—transform a benign enquiry into a bludgeon.

Father Tom’s spiritual awakening struck in the desert. It was the 1960s and Tom was working in Woomera – an area of the South Australian outback harbouring military secrets. “It was a wild time, the 60s. I spent a lot of time partying, playing football, and pursuing women,” Tom tells me as we sit in his living room cluttered with books.

My father told anyone who would listen that he was an atheist, a foil to his mother’s church immersion. Chanting “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” clutching her rosary as Dad rushed our rented Ford Mustang through a Miami Beach thunderstorm, she frightened me with her fear.

They laid my mother on the table, a sheet to cover her face from seeing the belly once kissed by men on warm, tropical nights. It looked so different now, sterile. The freckles dotting her pale round belly looked like an infection rather than the constellations. The doctors inserted a scalpel and held plastic buckets on either side, careful to not let the blood spill onto the floor.