So why the shed, then? The shed stands without She in it. He stands in the shed with the shed things—tools, tag-board, rope—and does work: staples an electrical cord to a block of wood, a strip of cloth for a skirt, some scalp. So many projects are incomplete.
She comes to the kitchen on Sundays and cries in the eggs and their son sticks to the chair. His skin sags near the sockets.
The sister he plugs into the wall while the car-battery charges so they can leave, but they come back because where will they go? This is the way the week works and someday the sister will tell them what is new because she is new, because she does not yet live.
He loves her more than what is already made and works.
She sits in the back bedroom and sleeps, and sometimes She comes out, sometimes he sees She float above the floor with a face over her face, and he leaves through a side door where there is a sun and a yard and where every year he sticks the boy like a stalk in the dirt for the birds to gather and group. He finds the shed, shuts the door.
The shed is made of tin, no windows, so sometimes he opens the tin door and he sees She’s face, the face over her face, smashed into the window by the sink. When She watches behind a face behind the window he hides again and drills a hole into a loose limb.
His teeth rot and he can taste it. He tastes, too, his sweat and his salt. Sometimes he pees in an old coffee can he keeps for nails gone to rust and flakes. From a hole in the floor he reaches in and feels earth so moist.
At sunset a Pontiac passes with a hat in the window, some leather gloves gripping the wheel. The Pontiac always passes with the sun while his son sinks in the soil and his skin is bleached. The boy’s eyes used to burn with a fire for the balls in the basket She buried by their only tree. But the fire scorched and so he stands tied to a stick, and so his mouth hangs at the seams.
These days he thinks his son should stay in the shed so his sister will not be lonely when she lives at last.
When he does not bring the boy in She floats above the floor and screams beneath the skin on her skin and She peels her nails with house keys and keeps them in a can on the counter. The oven is always on though She makes no meat.
He gave her gardening tools back when Grandma died and said, “So now you will plant the things that grow,” but She buried things like bicycle tires and tow rope and reams of paper She’d saved in piles for shredding but instead put under the earth. He grew angry.
The boy stays against the stick all day and the birds come.
The Pontiac always passes with the sun and sometimes it slows to a creep so that maybe the hat and the gloves can see the house, see the yard grass balding in big splotches where there was no water. When it slows he stands, hands holding a shovel he uses to dig during patches of day that don’t require the shed or the shade of his kitchen and the sound of her screaming beneath skin. The Pontiac passes, sun shining on all glass, leather hands tight on a wheel that turns the tires, and maybe someday after sunset the tires will turn into the yard and the car doors will open against the end of the day and he will meet them as they move toward what he made. He will be goddamned if he’ll let them have it.
A switch won’t work in a room of mirrors. There are holes in the wall so he can hold the wires and he begs She to turn the plastic piece up and then down. Her tongue moves against the mouth over her mouth and her nos make no sense so She shakes her head when he says what. She says her nos against skin placed so She can’t speak so he says what louder and She shakes her head and weeps and he says what and She sobs and the skin is turned so that her face is not where a face should sit on the head. He holds the wires and shouts what and She will not flip the switch no matter how loud he asks.
The neighbors know not to look. Long ago they shut their shades.
Sometimes he stands above She’s bed with a heavy book and he hopes to crush the face beneath this face, to batter She to death with the binding. But She snores all soft or else he sees her from a long mirror, standing in the corner behind a door, laughing without a voice.
Sometimes She touches his neck when he’s near the window and he voids his bladder. Sometimes She is on her knees when She does not float.
Some days the sun is behind clouds and it is cooler than it can be and the boy’s head droops like a blossom from a stalk. Soon it will wilt because it is heavy and the wind will blow it away; elsewhere his child will be once more, many more times and perhaps he will grow to be a man.
In the shed the sister—scalp, skirt, slivers and all—gives a start when the channel chews on metal and he thinks she will breathe at last and show them what is new, what waits beyond these walls, beyond these streets, beyond the blinded windows and locked doorways of this city block. But the wood won’t yet move on its own, won’t say anything he doesn’t already know.
The Pontiac pulls close and crawls, and because of the clouds he can’t see the hat or the leather hands holding the wheel, but he knows that now it will slow so it can come into the yard and ruin what remains of the grass with its weight. He waits and watches and the dark windows reflect his house, his shed—and it desires what he made all from scratch, from the pieces other people left behind because they had hate.
He will tell the driver, the passengers in passenger seat, in back seat both if they be there—he will tell them that he loves his house and he loves his family, and he will tell them so that they know it is true.
The tires turn toward the yard.
Joel Kopplin’s stories have been in places like Nap, Housefire, and Apt. His novella Spaces is now available from Outpost19. He lives and teaches in La Crosse, WI.