A Block of Broken Houses

Pieces

Summer, delicious in its warmth.

I hear the pinging, ringing echo of my hammer, gripped in one hand and still hot from the pounding. I smell the dampness of our double garage, amazingly faint on that day but soon to be forever heightened. I smell the oily stink of grease, some past spill or leak long forgotten. I smell freshly cut wood, a sweet, warm scent that once triggered thoughts of summer sunshine and sweat and chilled beer but since provokes only an empty, meaningless sorrow. I see the flecks of sawdust twisting in the soft breeze, dancing around me until they settle on my hair, my clothes, inside of my nose.

My back is sore. And my knees. My neck, too. I've yet to purchase a table for my chop saw and I've been kneeling and bending and measuring and cutting off and on for nearly two hours now. I stand to stretch. I glance out into the sunshine to check on my daughter; she was riding her bike in wide, lazy circles on our driveway not five seconds ago. She's not anymore, though. Not that I can see, anyway. I was only keeping a back-of-my-mind ear on her; the training wheels rattling on the stone-littered driveway had been assisting me, but with the sporadic screams of the chop saw I must have lost the sound of her movement. I call her name and she doesn't answer.

She was right there, and now she's gone.

Until this point my life has been solid and steady, all pillars surrounding it set firmly in place and showing no signs of erosion. My life has been wonderful in every sense of the word's meaning, but now one pillar is gone...missing. Something with teeth clamps around my heart and sinks in deeper with each passing second, and suddenly I'm cold.

I call her name again, this time moving, slowly at first and then in panicked steps...or so it seems, because I have no real sense of moving any quicker than before. The three cars parked in our driveway are blocking my view to the road and I wonder briefly why we have so many. Two would do, and we could manage with one. Perhaps if we had managed, perhaps if I hadn't bought that wreck of a beauty to fix up, she'd still be with us...perhaps.

I glance from side to side—from one neighbour's front yard to the other—but this is a formality, only to check those mental boxes fluttering in my head like angry mosquitoes, because already I'm moving toward the road; in my near-lifeless heart I know that's where she's gone. I call her name again and as my vision crests the rusted top of that beaten-up piece-of-shit Thunderbird I can see the crown of the helmet we bought her last summer, the bright sunlight tickling the purple and pink and yellow flecks surrounding the butterfly- and ladybug-print she had instantly fell in love with.

As I get closer—inching in sickly slow steps because I can't seem to move any faster than that—I see that she's studying something on the ground, something I can't make out, small pebbles or a bug, maybe. Closer still and I see that she's on the road, not by much, maybe by foot or so, but she's on it, and that's enough to make my stomach sink and fill with something that feels like cold metal. I call her name again—for the fourth and last time—only as loud as I think I holler I can't seem to hear my own voice. Instead of her beautiful name I hear an overwhelming rumbling—a screaming engine leading a tattered muffler. I hear partially deflated tires kissing screeches from the road.

I'm running now, only that's an illusion; I'm climbing through molasses.

This is when she looks at me. This is when she smiles. This is when her eyes are the brightest. This is when the colours and sounds and smells of this nightmare escalate and become too real, like I'm trapped in a small room, my sensory perception sharpened to a maddening degree, and all of it—her radiant eyes, her glaring helmet, the sharp coughing of the approaching car's muffler, the thick thump of my heart, the ill stink of hot wood buried in my nose, the stench of burnt tires—is ricocheting around me in tight circles, heaving me close to an edge I pray will simply give way and take me to her.