For a few days, the house beat like a wounded thing: stair stomps that rattled my joints, doors slammed with the clean punctuation of anger, shrill screaming that shredded the air and then fell away into long hours of a silence so heavy it made the shed feel like a held breath. Slowly, as if coaxed by routine, we in the shed relaxed our postures and went about the tasks set for us. We moved quietly, like things that knew how to be invisible.
Then came the Fourth of August, a day that erased the line between before and after. An omnipresent evil I did not recognize threaded into the house like smoke. I pressed myself flat against the shed wall and listened—the soft tread of shoes on boards, the distant murmur of conversation, the china tinkling in the kitchens as if someone were playing at gentleness. Heat and the smell of sunbaked wood lay over everything.
Without warning, a hand closed around my neck. The pressure was sharp and immediate; I was hauled up the back stairs, then higher still, each step a jolt against my frame. Fabric swallowed me—layers and layers of it—binding me tight, muffling the world into a far-off thunder. For a moment, I hung in suspended silence, held like some prize animal, and then the motion began.
I was thrown upward and downward in a savage rhythm, a storm of movement that pitched me like a sail in hurricane seas. Each impact drove through me: the snap of joints, the sting of splinters rebelling beneath pressure. I lost count somewhere after nine—numbers blurred into the cadence of being struck. The grip around my neck was a vice: fierce, thrilling, maddening. When release finally came, it was as sudden as the initial seize—my body swung like a child’s tied-to-the-tree swing, back and forth, trembling until the motion finally died away. I stood—or rather, I swayed—damp with the slick of sap and dust and something that might have been sweat. My timbers quivered as after a freezing plunge.
The effect was intoxicating. The work had been mighty, awful, and I hungered at once for another taste. Would this become the tenet of my days? Would I be marked now as an engine of wrath, a thing that had learned too well how to wound? Before my thoughts could fully form into fear, the house erupted in a commotion just a few feet away—voices, hurried footfalls, a scatter of clattering sounds. For a heartbeat, everything stilled as if the world had paused to listen. My own silence swelled into an eager anticipation.
Memory of the motion returned to me; the epiphany of a remembered song. The sensation—freeing, fearless, independent, powerful—rushed back like tidewater. I felt a new appetite rise inside me, an urge to slash and thump and deliver harsh, angry blows until there was nothing left to strike. I had tasted the rocket-flare of exertion and craved its renewal.
And then it came again. Hands seized me; the neck was squeezed; the white knuckles of the holder, deadened from pressure, clung to me. I was driven into the same wild rhythm: one, two, three—then countless others, each strike erasing the last in a blur of motion and noise. Counting became meaningless. The grandeur of the exhilaration was the only compass I trusted in those moments.
Suddenly—without rise or warning—the motion stopped. The last impact left me undone. I felt myself split, not merely in surface but to the very marrow. A crack raced through my form and opened like glass under an iron boot. Splinters sheared away and lodged like teeth. Half of me fell silent, lifeless, a slab of useless wood; the other half remained, raw and howling with a pain that had no voice. My spine—the straight, steady core that had borne so much—was severed. I could no longer stand as I had stood; I could no longer obey.
They finished with no ceremony. My broken pieces were tossed as if they were the offal of a day’s work into the basement dungeon, tumbled through choking ash until grit filled every seam. They rolled me into the ash box, and the cold, gray powder took me into its dark. In that narrow, sooty coffin I waited, condemned to stillness, the world reduced to the muffled scrape of distant feet and the intermittent rattle of the pushcart collector’s wheels. I lay there, cracked and useless, while the house above steamed with its private tempests—and once again the house had given me over to what it wanted.