I want the wood.


It is perfect, I've decided, ever since I ran past it hours ago. The size of a shutter. Old good wood, painted a green so light it is half mint, half white stem, and just left out in a pile of trash at the curb. It will do for my purpose, which is painting a sign for legends, and I've waited until dusk and go back and grab it like the savage that I am.

I wear my wispy green pants under a dress of dull brown, a long canvas jacket over top. Quiet clothes for a quiet walk alone in the fading light. The house that has dumped the wood is a mile out on my running route, not seemingly very far. A route I knew by heart, a hilly neighborhood half up above Gypsy Hill park.

I cut across the graveyard, feeling the gathering silence around me. The saucer magnolia and tulip trees go on blooming in Thornrose, but everything else is that iron blue cast, devoid of any color but the deepening sky overhead. I slink through the shadows, cocky, reflecting on how I am not afraid of the dead. I think about the old stories of ghosts leaving their graves with the twilight mists to wander the earth, but I don't see any, or feel even the wind stir my hair. The angelic statues are a livid white against the thick tree trunks and tangled forsythia.

It's longer than I remember, walking. As I clear Thornrose and turn north toward Gypsy Hill, a truck pulls in to park along the road, but nobody gets out. As I pass, I hear the voice of a man yelling inside and what sounds like a child whining and crying. It must be hard to be a parent, but I can't help but think the man sounds out of control. I look back to see him through the dashboard reaching bodily back into the backseat.

I'm starting to grow nervous for my wood. Maybe I imagined it even existing. I'm sure that it was in this general area of the neighborhood. I try to reckon if this is a crazy thing to do in the first place: surely real adults don't go filching in other people's trash. I think about what my mother would say of me if she knew I was on this dumb quest. I imagine her voice chiding me in my head. Maybe someone else took it; maybe it wasn't trash to begin with. I have all but given up hope when I spy it at the bottom of the hill in amongst a pile of yard waste and broken furniture. My triumph, my sign, my shutter.

It is not dirty, but the paint is a little splintery, and the whole thing is much, much heavier than I anticipated. Even so, I brush it off and lift it, bracing against my hip. It's bigger than I thought, big enough to hide myself behind like a shield if I wanted, and I amuse myself as I head back up the hill by imagining the tower shield it would make if I made shields out of wood. I transfer the wood to balance on my head, like my dad used to do when he was carrying impossibly heavy buckets of water and catch back from a fishing trip, rods bundled between his elbow and head.

Up the hill: that truck again, though, except now it's a chaos of screaming and slamming doors. The man is out around the driver's side, grabbing and pulling bodily at a woman in the drivers seat who is crying and yelling at him. He's cursing and threatening. She's trying to start the car, but they're grappling for the keys.

I stop. I don't know what to do, so I just stop in front of the car and look at the man, my wood balanced stupidly on my head. I'm aware suddenly of the emptiness of the street, the lack of phone or tool in my pocket, my lack of pockets. He is completely intent on her, physically overpowering her, bending her wrists away from the wheel.

So what I do is this: I say, Hey, stop so quietly that nobody can hear me over the yelling. Heystopstopstopstophey. The most ineffectual ghost--a helper of no one.

The woman has thrown the keys into the passenger side, so the man has to charge around the front of the truck to get at them. In doing so, he finally spies me, standing just feet away. He bangs both of his fists down hard on the hood. "My girlfriend is a psychopath!" he screeches at me. I continue to do my best impression of an animal about to be struck by a car.

He gets in the passenger side, and they argue more quietly, aware, while I gape. It is agreed that they will continue on, and the woman brings the truck back to life with a sputtering turn. They drive away, while I watch, impotent.

I walk back with the shutter balanced on my head. I smell warming air, buttery wood smoke, fried chicken from the distant gas station mixed with something else--a raw, old summer smell: skunk. The mountains in the distance are blue, outlined in pink like the pucker of infection at the edges of some dark scab.

I think about the way his anger has gotten into me, my strange instinctive recoil from a man being violent. Something in my blood that turns me to flight. I can feel it even in a raised voice. I have always hated yelling. This isn't my conflict, I think. This isn't my baggage. Unbidden, I recall my freshman year of college when my two best friends had left me at a party, jeering about some stringy, awkward boy with a backpack who had been following me around. He had followed me back when I tried to leave, cornering me in a dark room. I remember the moment I'd suddenly realized I should be afraid of him. You don't understand, he'd slurred, accusing, pushing me back and grasping my arms with surprising strength, you're my angel, and I had wriggled away like a salamander, out into another blue night.

On my walk home, this night, I skirt the graveyard and hold my shutter again like a shield. I see two cops idling in an empty parking lot, and I want to scream at them, what are you doing? there were people up there yelling but what would they even do? People are allowed to yell. No laws were being broken, the man could barely be charged for creating a disturbance.

I pass under a hedge of forsythia, lashes of yellow flowers trailing over me, and I think about this, the hard long word: forsythia, and how it was the first flower I ever learned, back when my handsome father used to haul me around the yard on his big football player shoulders, teaching me the names of flowers. Now, here, twenty-seven year old me walking with my shutter can appreciate the way that I was never damaged, never hurt or abused, and only just a little unplanned for, a little unwanted. I'm lucky in ways I don't know how to chart. I know how to hook a worm, tie a fly, and I can name the trees, and I don't know to run when I should. This is more than enough.