Under the Sill

I locked the door. I went to the car that was mine, the one that had never worn a logo, the one that smelled like nothing except dust and the pine tree air freshener I had bought in a fit of wanting to be the kind of man who cares about smell. I sat with the engine off for a count of ten because starting too fast felt like running.

Monday was a fluorescent country waiting on the other side of Maple. I would cross into it with coffee on my breath and a weekend I could not spend as a story. James would ask. I would answer. The answering would be the first fire I set that did not need a barn.

The farm road was a direction I would not drive today. The barn was a shape I would not look up. The van was a story for someone else to write in a report if they ever wrote it. My job was a cubicle and a spreadsheet and a man named James who would ask how the weekend was as if weekends were a shared country.

I started the engine. I backed out the honest way, headlights on, a citizen. The hobby, if that is what I was going to call it, would have to learn how to wear a cubicle.

Monday was already in the air, a fluorescent smell even here, even on my street with the missing shingles and the quiet lawns. I drove toward it with a lie in my mouth and two dark phones in a drawer, and I did not look at the garage in the mirror until the house was small, and then I looked anyway, and it looked like a house.

That was the other insult. It always would.