Inside, I head straight for the shower.
Get the drywall dust off and eat something standing up at the counter, then I carry a glass of water out to the back porch to watch the dark come down, because the evenings are the stretch I still haven't worked out how to fill.
That's when I hear her.
A voice, low and tired, carrying through the line of pines from the yard next door.
A woman's voice.
I can't make out the words—she's not pitching them for anybody, she's talking the way you talk when you're sure you're alone—but the sound comes across the still air clear as a struck bell, soft and rough at the edges.
I go still in the chair, glass halfway to my mouth.
I don't mean to listen. It isn't mine to listen to. But the words keep drifting over, and there's firelight flickering through the trunks where her pit must be.
I sit there in the dark with the glass forgotten in my hand and I don't move a muscle.
She says something I don't catch, and then she laughs.
It's quiet, and it's surprised out of her, like whatever she's talking to did something she wasn't expecting—and then a dog's tags jingle in the dark and I understand she's been talking to himthis whole time, the one that barks at me every morning, and the breath goes out of me slow and strange.
A woman alone at a fire, talking to her dog, laughing at him where nobody can see.
I haven't wanted anything in seven years.
The mania burned the house down and the medicine that put it out soaked everything else along with it.
Food's gone to maintenance. Music's just sound coming out of a speaker.
I've sat in a room packed with my brothers, loud and laughing, and felt like a man watching them through plate glass, close enough to touch and sealed off from all of it.
The doctors call it flat affect and tell me it eases for some people with time.
I quit waiting for the easing. The waiting hurt worse than the flat did.
I'm not waiting tonight.
Tonight there's a voice through the trees and a small tired laugh.
Something in me leans toward it the way a plant leans at a window, before I've decided anything, before I can talk myself out of it.
The first real pull I've felt toward anything since they walked me through the hospital doors and the locks closed behind me.
And it scares the hell out of me.
Because the last time I felt something strong, it didn't stay small.
It got big, it got loud, and it talked me into believing I was something more than a man.
I’ve spent years taking every pill in that grid making good and sure I never feel anything that big again.
But this isn't the engine kicking over. I know the engine.
This is smaller and it's warmer and it's only—wanting to hear her laugh again.
Wanting to know what the dog did to earn it.
I sit in the dark a long time after her fire dies down and her back door clicks shut.
