Trent England
That I didn’t know what the sound was, the day I was under the sink repairing a leak and examining your expired products. You had come into the kitchen and asked me to stop and then come up and look out the window, and Shhh, and Listen, listen to that sound, what in God’s name is that awful sound. You asked if I knew, said that it sounded like it was coming from behind that old truck the earth was reclaiming.
That I had been born into money, and I once parted my hair a certain way and had certain things and desired certain girls as a young boy. What made me want to be a manual laborer, and why my eyes twitched, and why I looked away when I answered. That it was because I was trying to fix the sink, and that I knew how to fix a sink.
Why I believed in God, and every story point I made afterwards, the stories I told about my childhood walking to church watching lightning in the distance crying to sleep at night thinking about souls worrying about who and who in the world were not being fed bread and drippings.
That other story from my childhood about what I was doing while my father was smoking a pipe. My mother making ice my sister out bothering the man who worked the stables with a Slavic bent in his walk. That I peeked my head just enough above the fence to see them all while I was doing it, and that even from a distance I could smell the woody scent from my father’s pipe, and even now while doing that thing I can still smell his pipe.
That I had enjoyed fucking in the woods, and if it was even fucking at all, and what exactly it was we did that made it fucking, what separated it from purely fucking around, or was it a different day altogether simply fucking in the bedroom after watching something on television that was set in the woods, or watching characters on television fuck in the woods, or watching characters on television fuck in a bedroom after they themselves had watched something set in the woods.
That the reason your sister saw me go into that motel on her way home from picking her daughter up from ballet practice was because I often did part-time work for them and had to routinely repair their shower heads and change the locks and replace the cables behind the televisions after mice or rats or ambiguous rodents had gnawed at them.
That I could stay with you for a long period of time without wanting to copy your keys, without rifling through the hallway drawer where the bank statements were kept, without smelling your clothes in the dark detecting what cigarettes the other man smoked.
Why it was taking me so long to finish repairing the leak. Why it was months and months. Why it had escalated from a simple repair into a complete overhaul of kitchen plumbing. This made you nervous, I remember, standing on the other side, smoking in the doorway, pacing, holding the phone. You asked if I knew why you were anxious to get the kitchen work done, and I simply shook my head and said no, sticking a flashlight into my mouth to examine the little details of your undersink.
What I said when you found me. What I was doing at the old truck. Why I blamed it on the caffeine and what little sleep you had offered me, what I later tried to pass off as something that needed organization, and why I didn’t stop even though I could hear your wading shoes shaking the grass and I could tell you had changed cigarettes again.