Pickup Day

Warning: contains family violence.

Iggy’s mother and I used to say we’d do anything for our beloved child — absolutely anything.

We’d laugh when we said it, as if naming a terrible truth somehow kept it tame. But beneath the jokes was the unspoken understanding parents carry like a dormant instinct: that there are unthinkable lengths a person might go to when their child is at stake. The stories of adrenaline-fuelled strength — parents lifting cars, walking into fire — always made sense to us. Those primal power surges came from a part of the human brain older than reason.

My pickup day from school is Wednesday — one bright drop of colour in a week otherwise dissolving into emails, traffic, and the slow erosion of routine. At first, it was logistics: my boss clocked off early, and I could duck out in time to make the bell. But over time, it became something else. A ritual. A small, steady promise I kept to both my son and myself.

The school gate became the unofficial dad’s club. Pete, Jimmy and I — three middle-aged blokes clinging to the illusion that we weren’t shrinking into our own habits. We traded footy scores, bad backs, worse swings, and ambitious talk of the next golf course we’d “conquer,” knowing full well our best days were behind us. At the gate, being a father mattered more than being an employee.

But last Wednesday, the usual easygoing banter was replaced by puzzled looks.

“Did Iggy leave his drink bottle again?” Jimmy asked, but even his joking tone felt stretched thin.

“Uh, no,” I said. “I’m here to pick him up.”

The look they exchanged hollowed out my stomach.

“Mate,” Pete said, trying to laugh, “I watched you leave with Iggy when I got here.”

“So did I,” Jimmy added. “Are you feeling okay?”

Their questions knocked me back a step.

“What do you mean you watched me leave with Iggy?”

“Fifteen minutes ago,” Pete said. “It was definitely you — same car, same shirt, same everything.”

“Only difference,” Jimmy said, “you didn’t wave.”

“Yeah,” Pete added quietly, “it was like you didn’t recognise us.”

The world tilted. I wasn’t running yet, but every cell in my body screamed at me to start.

When I did move, it was pure instinct — through the gate, past the startled teacher on duty, straight to Iggy’s classroom.

He wasn’t there.

“Angus?” Ms Simpson blinked, as if I was the strange thing in the room.

No time to reply. My legs carried me faster than my thoughts — down the corridor, out into the car park.

The bay where I always parked was empty.

My car was gone.

A shiver rippled through me. The leaves in the trees rattled though the air was completely still.

I called Rochelle.

Voicemail.

By the time I reached our street, dusk had thickened into that uncanny blue-orange twilight that makes everything look slightly wrong. My car was in the driveway, engine ticking — the metallic heartbeat of something recently alive.

Inside, laughter — familiar, but wrong.

Then came Iggy’s unmistakable cackle, that sharp, hawkish little burst I usually adored. Tonight, it slid through me like a razor, clean and effortless.

I burst through the front door and into the living room — and froze.

My son sat cross-legged on the floor, calmly rolling his old cast-iron toy truck back and forth.

Beside him sat an impostor — me.

Not a lookalike.

Me.

Same shirt. Same worn boots. Same faint scar above the eyebrow from when I crashed my bike at fourteen.

“Hey, buddy,” the impostor said without looking up. “We’re almost done fixing that dicky wheel we promised to sort out months ago.”

Iggy’s head snapped toward me. His grin faltered. Confusion washed across his face — small at first, then tightening into something close to terror.

“Dad…?” he whispered. “Why… why are there two of you?”

Pain clenched my chest. “Get away from him,” I said, the words scraping out of my throat like something broken.

The impostor finally looked up. His eyes were calm — unnervingly so — the eyes of someone carrying far too much knowing.

Something twisted hard under my ribs. “I said get away from him,” I growled, each word dragged over stone.

He held my stare. His expression didn’t shift. “You won’t understand yet,” he said softly. “But I had to come back. He’s the only one who can break the loop.”

Iggy’s face folded in on itself, and the terror in his eyes struck me like a clenched fist, driving the agony in my chest straight into my gut.

“Why are there two of you?” he cried.

Before I could answer, the impostor reached toward him. Not threateningly — gently, like a father who knows the exact weight of his child’s shoulder.

Iggy panicked.

He grabbed the cast-iron truck and swung it with all the desperate strength of a terrified eight-year-old.

The sound of metal on skull was a dull, awful finality.

The impostor collapsed.

A split-second later, agony detonated inside me.

I fell to my knees, screaming without sound, clutching at a wound no blow had made. Blood spread across my shirt, hot and unstoppable. The final moments held clarity – not pain.

Whatever bound us wasn’t metaphor.

It wasn’t theory.

It was real.

Together we perished. A moment of once unfathomable transcendence.

Iggy’s horrified face pulled away from me, shrinking as though I were drifting upward in a hot-air balloon, already too far to reach. He dropped the truck, his trembling hands useless at his sides, his scream for his mother splitting the air.

Rochelle arrived minutes later, though I was long gone. Breathless and wild-eyed, she followed Iggy’s upward stare just as police lights strobed cold blue and white across the walls.

She watched the impostor dissolve into a drifting cloud of subatomic dust, as though the universe were quietly reclaiming a mistake.

Our son sat in the wake of that insanity — fighting for breath beside the blood-stained truck, unable to look away from the ruin he believed he had caused.

Rochelle took it all in — the two bodies, the dust, the terror etched into our child’s face — and something inside her seemed to fold in on itself, silently.

At last she whispered, barely audible:

“We said we’d do anything for him… but I never thought the universe would ask this much.”