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For blankety-five years Dad and his heirlooms have transitioned from chic to shabby, and now a trickle of bargain hunters clutching Penny-Savers are picking through a houseful of incongruous clothing and furniture “priced to move” on little red stickers like drops of blood with penciled numbers, the fours shaped like sailboats, the sevens slashed through as the nuns taught him. It’s Dad’s first and only downsize, a milestone as heavy as the English oak sideboard, $95 OBO you haul it. He wouldn’t hire a service or let me organize the sale, so I worry. I woke this morning from a dream of Dad pirouetting down a catwalk with his walker, doffing his toupee and catching his heels in the cuffs of his old dress pants. His price on every item is ludicrous but appropriate to the year he bought it. Of all the tongue-cluckers, one couple seems motivated, or the wife does. She’s looking for faults in the bedroom furniture while her husband stands, neck broken, scanning the titles in the bookcase. She doesn’t know what to say to Dad, so she lets him spin his yarn. He’s describing the “bedroom suit” and how he and Mom shattered the boxspring with newlywed acrobatics here in the only house they ever owned. A sly grin follows, then a chuckle, then a sob, then silence. She says “I know, I know” and touches his arm, then produces cash from a very tight purse and starts peeling off bill after bill. I don’t think she’s counting. She calls to her husband to bring the truck, then wipes her cheek and sighs and starts removing the wardrobe drawers. I watch Dad’s face to see if he’s all right. He catches my eye and winks, and fans his face with a handful of hundreds.
Original Copyright © March 01, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 06, 2026
All I have to share is that everybody could be happy with a bigger heart and smaller hands. Life could be effortless. Open your mouth to the falling fruit, fill a cup from the sparkling stream, everything else is trouble we get ourselves into. The sunny green world grows its own food, scrubs its air, flushes its waste, charts its course, all despite help from us. What grows on the trees is ours to enjoy until somebody lays down the harvest ladder, nails it to a post, and creates Fence. We should be along for the ride, not living off of tolls. Collect enough food from the trees to survive should be our one commandment. If necessary, kill something delicious. And don’t waste. And don’t steal. Trouble is, seeing two trees together, we imagine an orchard, and seeing an orchard, we imagine it ours, and seeing others in our orchard, we imagine it fenced, and the others expelled. Having spent two nights with the girl of my dreams, eyes as green as spring, he absorbed her and imagined his rivals murdered. In theory, he was the fitter lover; in practice, he was a better fencebuilder than a husbander of trees or girls. He built my sweetheart a house in a tree and ringed it with post and rail. I blamed her for not flying from a window, and turned my back, and spat. His fruit trees choked on worms. His well coughed buckets of ash. His hostage shuttered the windows and doors and turned her sunniness inward. But the fence took root and flourished and fed on the generous earth and overgrew the orchard and the house they had shuttered and barred, the girl so green and sunny and the man who took inventory: One, Two, Everything and Everyone.
Original Copyright © February 11, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
Very Short Novels 
Thank you so much, anhinga. This story, written 20 years ago, seems prophetic now. —David