Fist

Abstract

Fist Gabriel Houck (bio) There is a man in the park at night. He wears the shape of his many clothes, jackets inside of jackets, shedding first in the gas-shimmer heat of daytime, and then re-layering at dusk like a prophet of coming storms. He is friends with the finches and opossums; the biting midges of late summer leave him be. Once, you will catch him washing in the river. You will watch him peel down in the nettles and wade out to hip-level, the hard brown nut of his body shivering. ________ Find the keys in your pocket. Run your thumb along their teeth to index them, to be ready when you reach the door. Spin the keys in your hand. Move them finger-to-finger like your uncle's coin trick. You will master this in the safety of your pocket, in the same way you've mastered the step-count from the corner to your stoop, fifteen paces in darkness before the moonlight finds you. ________ Your uncle could make a quarter grow from the leather-brown soil of his knuckles. His smile was a devil's smile, though he'd call it love. The coin would dance in and out of sight, inching left to right and back again, until he would finally offer his hand to you, the only thing he'd offer without a price, and say Now you try it, but you would know in your heart, under the glare of that smile, that the coin wouldn't be there when the blossom of his palm opened. ________ There is a man in the park at night. He is made of wood and wicker, and when the wind is up he will whisper a song like radio static, a channel between channels for the misfit sounds of the city to shelter in. He keeps the foxes which hunt along the bike trail. He watches children chart the geography of their bodies in cars behind the dumpster. He has seen you in the woods. He watched when you were just a child, when you returned from the lake and your uncle caught a drifter rummaging in the bed of his pickup. He keeps the stories we do not tell. [End Page 41] ________ Your uncle built clocks and stitched sails. He played the trumpet at dawn at the boat house, which meant you had 7-10 minutes to get ready, depending on whether he'd already made coffee. Your days with him on the lake were an apprenticeship in silence. It was on this lake where you learned to split the inner and outer worlds from one another, like the metal edge of the horizon. Your hands learned the shape of the knots, your jaw the bite of the jib-boom. Your mouth learned not to speak while your body learned to do, which served you well many years later, when those men caught you in the alley behind the laundromat. The drifter at the boat launch—he learned the weight and purpose of your uncle's hands, but this was trick of the eye that you'd already memorized. ________ There is no man in the park at night. The foxes have moved on. Your dog sniffs the mysteries of their passing, and whines when you pull her from the thickets at the river's edge. You'll keep her this way, not out of cruelty, but as if it were a lesson in where we do and do not belong. ________ Turn the locks and kill the lights. Check the dog's water, let her remember you with the kiss of her nose. Play the game where you don't look, where you don't leave the room and then return again to be sure. Remember: your fear is a coin, and the shadows are a closed, empty fist. [End Page 42] Gabriel Houck Gabriel Houck's collection, "You or a Loved One," won the 2017 Orison Fiction Prize, with pieces selected as distinguished stories in the 2017 and 2015 editions of The Best American Short Stories, respectively. His work appears in Glimmer Train, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere...