Ain't Burned All the Bright

The narrator’s mother still won’t change the channel, his brother is still playing video games, and his sister is still talking to her friend about joining the protests, but the narrator “take[s] a break from them all to check on [his] father” (120-23). His father is self-isolating in another room and has a cough that sounds like “something is living inside him and dying inside him at the same time” (102-03). The imagery on the pages describing the father’s cough is composed entirely of bright red and black and features images of a tornado pulling a house apart. His dad lies in bed, alone, covered in sweat, continuing to cough. The narrator’s mother warns him not to go into the room with his father, so he peeks through the crack in the door, and his father—not broken by the sickness—smiles back at him. His father reassures him that things will get back to normal in a few weeks and that they’ll be hugging and joking as usual. An image depicts a pair of hands, presumably the narrator’s, sewing a quilt. After the narrator’s father initially reassures him, the narrator sees a clear blue sky through the crack in the door and out the window.