All I ever really knew of my father was the back of his carved head. When he worked at the hospital he was in his early twenties, and I was still ten years away from being conceived. I never knew him. But I have always known him.

He was fifteen feet tall with arm muscles as big as a carnival strongman. He could have picked me up with his pinkie finger. He read three books a day and he did his crosswords in pen. He could do long division in his head. He had perfect pitch, could throw a rugby ball accurately with his eyes closed, and could have been a punk rock superstar. But instead he worked at the hospital.

Every morning he woke at dawn and did push-ups while composing sonatas in his head. He breakfasted on fresh fruit and homemade porridge. He walked to work, the summer air warming the dawn goose bumps from his arms. When my father was young, it was always summer.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good morning,’ said everyone he met, and every single one of them smiled, and every one thought about what a wonderful man he was. He spent his days picking up the things that the residents of the hospital threw to the floor. He asked them polite questions and calmly answered their screams and weeping. He always lifted his feet properly when he walked.

Sometimes my father would have a thought that the people he looked after were awful and irritating and a drain on society; he would think that he would rather be a banker earning lots of money by exploiting strangers in another country, or a lawyer telling lies for whoever paid the most, or a doctor putting scraped and damaged bodies back together like jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing. But these thoughts did not stick. They flowed through his mind like soap slicking down wet skin.

He would always pick up his feet and rub the frown from between his eyebrows. Back then, the frown was not chiselled in. He stayed there so long that he forgot how to leave. He became just another statue with bronze-warm hands and shoulders wide enough for me to rest my head.

If the hospital was still there now, a secret lock-box for the people that no one wanted, my father would be there too. But he would be on the other side. He would not get up at dawn and do three dozen sit-ups. He would not get paid to answer weeping questions. He would not pick up his feet. He would wear a tightening coat and let his hair grease flat to his scalp. He would stare at a bee buffeting against the half-open window for minutes, and hours, and days. And forever. He would forget how to do long division in his head.

Kirsty Logan’s short fiction appears in Flatmancrooked, Pear Noir!, and Best Lesbian Erotica; she is the co-editor of Fractured West and the reviews editor for PANK. She is currently working on her first novel, Little Dead Boys, and has a chapbook, You Look Good Enough to Eat Me coming out with Forest in 2011. She lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend. Get in touch at kirstylogan.com.