Entry #79
October 8, 2024 — 10:00 AM
I was in the east bedroom late last night, working the baseboard free along the outside wall. Old varnish gives way like toffee if you warm it with your hands and wait. Edges first, then down. The room had that dry plaster taste and the cold of the window glass pushing in. Headlamp only. No fan, no radio. Nail squeal, wood sigh, stop, breathe, listen, start again. Routine.
I had the flat bar laid in and was easing the length out a quarter inch at a time. Dust sifted. My knuckles brushed the paint. The lamp threw a hard white oval across the join where the wall meets the floor. Everything else was black. I could hear my coat sleeve when I shifted my elbow.
Then, close to my right ear, something made the small wet click a mouth makes before a word. Not out in the room. Not from the wall. Right there, at the height of my head. A single sound, quick and full, as if it belonged to a throat inches away.
I let go. The bar dropped. I stepped backward into the hall without thinking and hit my shoulder on the jamb. The metal clanged once on the floor and then the quiet came back all at once, like when a refrigerator kicks off, only there was no machine on. I stood looking at the dark square of the doorway, breathing through dust.
It was the nearness that did it. Not volume. Nearness is a measure you don’t argue with when it’s close enough to fog your ear.
After a minute I went back in and picked up the tool. I checked the window sash. Both latches set. No draft on my cheek, no seam whistling. No vent. Nothing alive in the room besides me and whatever has been living in the walls for a century, long since dried. The mouth of the heater in the hall was cold. I put the bar back where it had been and finished pulling the board. I didn’t rush, but the work felt staged, like I was proving something to something.
On the back of the length, someone had scored lines, shallow and uneven, the way you do when the knife slips. E and then a scratched next stroke that could be an L or a B. Old pencil marks too—measurements in a hand that leans left. I wiped it with my sleeve and set it against the wall. I’ll sand it later.
I resent that I stepped back. It was automatic and it put me in the hall, where I didn’t intend to be. I don’t like the house having a say in where I stand. I don’t like knowing my hand can open and my feet can move before I get a vote.
I did not see anything. I do not think there was anything to see. The event was the space of a second, and it was enough.
A body can be persuaded faster than a mind.
— Thomas Hale