Eight Feet of Resolve

Inoticed it before I noticed anything else. Not the house, not the trees going orange and red at the edges of my property, not even Daisy barking from inside the truck where I’d left the window cracked. It was the light. Too much of it. My headlights swept across the yard as I turned onto the gravel drive, and where there should have been wood and shadow at the north boundary, there was just open air, and through that open air I could see straight into my neighbor’s patio, warm yellow light spilling from a string of bulbs they’d hung between two posts, and the silhouette of a volleyball net stretched across what had been, a week ago, the enclosed privacy of my own land.

I stopped the truck halfway up the drive and sat for a moment with the engine running. Daisy had stopped barking and was pressing her nose against the window glass, trying to understand the same thing I was. I turned off the headlights. In the dark, the absence was even clearer. The jagged silhouettes of broken fence posts jutted from cracked concrete footings along the north line like something had come through in a storm. Boards were piled on my side in a loose, indifferent heap, the way you stack debris after clearing it without particularly caring where it lands.

Their boys were playing under the volleyball net. Laughing, diving in the grass. And Ethan Carter stood on his back patio with a set of grilling tongs, flipping something over a flame, the picture of a man having a perfectly fine Tuesday evening.

I got out of the truck slowly.

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