Entry #43
March 31, 2024 — 10:15 PM
I meant to square a strike plate on the back stair closet. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. The door has been catching since I planed it last week. A tiny correction—shift the mortise, ease the edge, put it to bed.
I took the 5/64 bit, a screwdriver, the narrow chisel, the pencil with three sharp sides left, and the little headlamp because that landing shadows itself. The kitchen clock read 7:52 when I set the kettle on. Pull chain in the stair light stuttered once and held, a low filament hiss. The air there leans colder than the kitchen by a couple degrees. It smells like dry soap and old pine swept too many times with a damp rag.
The latch was out of line by a hair—two millimeters shy. I marked it, kissed the chisel to the jamb until the bright wood showed. I remember that part, and the way the dust took to the sweat along the back of my hand. Then I remember reaching for the screws and thinking to make the pilot holes a touch south. That is the last clean bead on the string.
When I came back to myself the kitchen was hard dark out the window and the kettle had cooled to skin. The clock said 10:11. The radiator had on-offed and gone quiet without me hearing it do either. The stair bulb was still burning, headlamp band printing a crease across my temple. The screwdriver had migrated to the lower step. A coil of pine curled soft against my sleeve as if I had just knocked it free. My thumb had a dull ache I couldn’t place. A fresh nick in the trim glared at me that I would not have cut that way on purpose.
I stood a while, listening for something that would account for it—furnace, truck brakes, a neighbor’s door—but only the bulb hum and my breath against the cold rail. I tried to reconstruct. There were three screws on the second step when I began; now two were on the fourth and one was sunk, proud by half a head, into a hole I don’t remember starting. The pencil was on the landing at an angle that marked nothing. There was a little fish-shaped chip on the tread I would have thrown away if I had seen it fall. The headlamp had lost a bar of battery. I had grit between my teeth and could not say when I’d put them together.
Light shift is the loudest thing. At 7:52 the window above the landing still had copper to it. By the time I noticed it again it was a square of black that reflected the bulb back at me as a pale coin. The air had tightened. The closet’s shelf wood felt colder under my palm than it had a moment—no, than it had three hours ago. The kitchen smelled faintly of metal in that way it does when water is heated and left to think about it too long.
On the inside face of the jamb, below where I opened the mortise, there are faint letters I don’t think I made: E. B., cut shallow with something finer than my chisel, old enough to have darkened into the grain. I ran my thumbnail across them and the line caught at the nail. I don’t know if they were there at 7:52. I don’t know what I did between thinking south by two millimeters and looking up into night.
I rely on minutes the way I rely on studs: regular, load-bearing, where you left them. Tonight the house pulled my hand along without telling me where my head went. I dislike any room from which time exits faster than I do.
— Thomas Hale