“Hank” by Matthew Zanoni Müller

A short story by alum Matthew Zanoni Müller (fiction, ’10) appears at Halfway Down the Stairs:

Hank lived in a light blue trailer up a thin dirt drive some distance behind his friend Aaron’s house, who owned the property. Hank paid him a couple hundred bucks in rent to “hide out back there,” as Aaron said. But it wasn’t really hiding to Hank. It was where he felt all right with things. One of the few places. The trailer was surrounded by pines that shed pin-prick drops of sap in a painfully slow drizzle, against which Hank had strung a giant blue tarp like a sail over the roof of his trailer and pickup. Underneath, the light sifting through the canopy gave everything a blue tinge, like being underwater in a swimming pool whose floor was covered in pine needles. A smaller tarp hung like a kite over the outhouse he had built and which, he was happy, Suzanne hadn’t seemed to mind using the first time she had come over, two days before. That was after dinner, and then again later, after sex, when with much laughter, she got into his big boots and clomped out to make use of it, the door of the trailer screaming on its springs and slamming shut behind her. He liked the feeling of her being out there, and knowing she was coming right back in with his “big man boots,” as she had called them.  It was a kind of aloneness he wasn’t used to. Usually there was no one coming back, and the space outside of his trailer seemed filled with a watchful silence that extended all the way to the top of the hill, where he had the vague intimation of being watched by something, a presence in the empty spaces between the trunks of the pines. Something that filled the darkness. A witness to his small life.

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