Betrayed Man Builds a Shed
There was more to it than he expected. Wood is forgiving but it has secret flaws. And because a sharp point causes the grain to crack, to split rather than collapse, he spent the morning blunting the heads of nails against the pavement. One nail, three scrapes. Nonsense thoughts fell into time with the comforting moderato triplets of the scratch: “the – black – eye … bro – ken – shoe … ap – ple – sauce … ve – ry – lost.” A shallow wound lined with concrete dust was carved into the walkway and the jar filled with slender nails. He did far more than the job required. He did them all.
Then there was an unnerving silence in the yard. Everything was as it always was. His bicycle leaned uncourageously up against the hose ring; at the bottom of the eaves trough the fluttering husk of a beetle was shackled by something microscopic; the eggshells in the compost quietly broke down. All the buried things in the earth were dead. But there was life beneath the plywood: pill bugs and centipedes quickly embraced and crawled over each other’s bodies on the panicked green-brown lawn. These sheets would form the body of the walls, perfect brittle squares cleverly pre-treated with an inviolate white undercoat. They communed with the 11:14 sun and blazed their shapes onto the back of his retinas. In their unblemished wholeness they shamed his broken heart. So when the plywood lay flat against the pine, and the pins broke the skin with one smash, he felt through them the satisfaction of crushing something delicate.
By Jay Brown. My buddy who just moved away :(
