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The Dance
(an excerpt from a much longer piece I've been working on)
(an excerpt from a much longer piece I've been working on)
In the blue-black shadow of the backyard, a piece of gutter hung from the house like a hang nail. It bounced playfully in the wind at the top of the backdoor. Next to it leaned a ladder. The gutter shared custody of the ladder with the unlit Christmas lights that limply hung over the front of the house. He looked up at the house from where he had collapsed in the cool spring grass after trying to sucker punch his son.
“You’re killing her, Dad,” his son had said before the blow. “Did you see her on that goddamn ladder? You’re working her into the grave while you just hide in your office.”
His wife had little to say except to shake her curls at the ladder. His daughter ripped handfuls of grass from the ground as she sobbed. The gutter wailed as it was pushed away from the house by the door being opened and he walked underneath his inadequacies.
He dragged his suitcase, filled with clothes still on the hangers, into his office and slammed the door. He stared at the doorknob and cursed its absence of a lock. He thought of his daughter, constantly employing the lock on her bedroom door every time she walked through it. That sound of metal twisting on metal broke his heart daily. He opened his office door, but only a crack.
The clock read 2:29 AM when he heard moaning in the backyard. He got up from the computer and parted the blinds with one finger. The palpable shadow of his daughter was stretched across the yard in the wake of the motion censored light. She lay face down in the black grass, and as he looked at her the window pane seemed to be streaked with rain, but it wasn’t raining. He picked up a screwdriver from his desk and began removing the door to his office one hinge at a time, the sound of metal on metal like a sonnet.
