The House of Everything Wrong   It seemed to be abandoned, that grey house with dark, uncurtained windows, plywood door nailed shut, garden growing only shadows —   so hard to see, so easy to ignore. I’d hurried past it lots of times. But then, just once, an old truck sat there, and that poor   plywood excuse for a front door had been pried open, and there he stood, cigarette in one hand, hammer in the other. When   I stopped he just nodded, as if we’d met before, as if he’d been expecting me. I said, “I didn’t think —” He wouldn’t let   me finish, shook his head. “You wanna see?” He stepped inside. I followed. “Please,” he said, a beat too late to mean anything. He   dropped the cigarette and ground it dead. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. “I got this place dirt cheap,” he said. “Burn-out.” He led   me past a skeletal wall, bare studs. “Bought ’er in an auction,” he said. “Didn’t know a thing back then, twenty years back. I taught   myself woodwork. Weekends. Here, let me show you.” I followed him up a narrow flight of stairs, bare treads, no rails or risers, no   reason for it that I could see, no light but one bare bulb. Maybe best not to tell him, not now, not yet, that nothing was right,   that I was a carpenter. “Rafter hell,” he said, pointing upward, grinning. Each board was bruised with missed blows, hammer dents. “I fell   one time,” he said. “It fucked me up.” His poor hands were as wrecked as the rafters, each one a battle of bent-over nails, of more   knots than clear wood. “But finally got ’em done,” he said in a voice wanting to be proud, wanting the years back, wanting life with none   of this counting, or none of it in doubt, and all of it good enough. “It’s my house,” he said, nearly in tears. I wanted out.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont November 2009