sans finger

The idea, it seemed to him, was quite natural; to build a shack for the summer. Find solitude from the house even if by only 100 paces. The house that he came back to again and again, where he had been born, and where the life of before him still went on after him with the same silent mystery. It was his idea not do much of anything for Reason or Rhyme. These two women had led him astray, he thought. This Rhyme and this Reason, like sirens calling to him. He had listened, fell into their gaze and forgot the chaos. It was through the path of these two that he had be brought back chaos without forewarning. This is what he needed to parse out. So he thought to build the shack and build the shack he did.

The grass, at their highest parts, tickled his knees. His black work boots soaked up sun in competition with his shoulders, who were losing that battle. Had it been a week since he'd washed his hair, or even referenced a shiny surface? The mid-day sun produced salted water that he drew from his forehead with his forearm. He had forgotten the heat and the sun and it seemed he would forget them if they did not insist on making themselves known. With a hammer jumping in his right hand the bundle of corrugated sheet metal occupied the left as he walked out to the field.

Arriving in the middle of the field he found the house behind, the crops beyond, woods to the right and to the left the interstate far enough away to make cars look like beads being passed through an invisible thread.

The structure was simple yet contrived. He couldn't think of symmetry, couldn't see the object so much as a whole but more as a collection of beauty and function. He chose pieces for their rusted edges and watermarked etchings. Some had been twisted beneath the wheels of a tractor - those he pierced into the surrounding earth, their only purpose to serve as focal points for the coming weeks. Still, he wasn't finished. The room without a roof remained an enigma, and so he threw down the pieces to sift through and divide and began his task to enclose his edifice.

He needed to bring that hammer down again and again, to nail metal to wood. It was an action with purpose that allowed his body to articulate the fire inside his brain. Creating sound that did not come from his body but bellowed out of his grief and frustration and like a boomerang came back around again to him. These sharp bursts numbed his ears providing the validating pain that it had not been his hearing that had been a problem but that there had been less and less words that entered them. Her words had become fewer and fewer until there was no way for her to say what she did, and instead she had walked out. There were also no words to request of her, he knew, because her language had become garbled and disconnected. No longer could he hold the rhythm of her gestures in his sight and translate their meanings. She had become an stranger again, which is what bothered him the most. To recall her was almost to have deja vous, feeling he had been there before but this was actually the first time. His anger flared up and he struck the tin roof again with the hammer.

At first it didn't look real. It was when he blinked that he felt the reassurance of pain. His lack of reaction surprised him, so he searched for the next thing he ought to do. It made sense, then, for his next move to be to step down from the ladder and walk back to the house. The sky was clear and there was a tender wind that encircled him. The silence was as intense as the heat which made his breathing annoying. Because there was nothing to hear, he could now hear it all. the grass crunching, the rubbing of his jeans, and his heart.

Some three hours later another sharp tone numbed his ears. At first he grabbed through his sound index in hurried frustration to place it. As he opened his eyes he was able to make the connection. He could see it was her mouth that was producing the sound, but it was her eyes that expressed the horror. He expressed question in his brow. Then that tickle on his chest, and it was as if his mother had screamed pain back into his body. He dared not move his hand but he made noises - guttural claps and barks mixed with long moans and breathy gasps to retain some sort of strength by exercising the pain.

The first words of the day came then from his father, "you're gonna lose that finger, son."

Tears cleared paths in the dirt on his face. Swan's face passed before him, but it was someone else's wisdom that he heard. The loss of the finger was not a loss, but an awakening. It was a sacrifice by blood, one which he could not make by heart or head alone. It was an end and as endings go, also a beginning.

His father was right. They amputated the left index finger two hours after arriving at the hospital. It was the three hours that damaged the nerves and gave time for the sun to boil the sausage that remained of his finger. Even then the bone had been crushed. Irreparable.

Gospel didn't mind the loss, in fact he was relieved to not have been given the choice or the following obligation lie for the rest of his life. He knew he couldn't tell people that he'd take the loss as a tangible to the intangible loss that had occurred months earlier. He was content to have proof; evidence.

It was three weeks before he returned to finish the shack, even against his mother's plea. She knew just as well as he did that he didn't have a choice. He needed to finish it and sit in it. And so that it what he did.