ONE SATURDAY, about two in the morning, I woke up to this scratching sound outside. Below the bedroom window and a little ways off, but not far. I sat up in bed and listened. Lindsay, still asleep next to me, evidently hadn’t heard it. The sound filtered through her puttered breathing, and through all the middle-of-the-night sounds in the house. The furnace, the clock. Those sounds came the way they always did, in almost apologetic intervals. But not the sound outside. It came in flurries with long pauses between, some so long I’d think it was over with, but then it’d suddenly start up again in a rush, like wind bursting through a dead tree.
We were new to the house. Our first as a couple. We’d been living in a condo on the North Shore, a place I’d had for a couple years, a place that became ours when we got married. But now it belonged to another couple, themselves newly married and up from Atlanta. I’d hated to let the condo go. I never said it to Lindsay while we were house hunting, but leaving the condo, and downtown in general, was a kind of resignation. A surrender, even. Life, it turns out, is indeed unbeatable. The new place, bordered in back by acres of woods, was a kind of confirmation of this. Goodbye Tremont, goodbye Sushi Nabe, goodbye good times all around. But the new house was a nice place, no doubt, a good house with good bones,
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Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), and Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024). He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. paulluikart.substack.com