Winner: Cook, Hammond, Logan Writing Prize

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The Salvage House

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        There was no path to the salvage house. Miller had to get off his motorcycle and walk.

It was behind the general store, on a patch of grassy, uneven land that had somehow held out against the shops in front of it and the woods behind it. There were a couple of sheds back there, too, one used by the Fire Prevention Society and the other standing bolted-up and empty. He shivered as he passed them. The sky was flat and grey, and dark birds wheeled in it, calling out. It smelled like rain.

         The salvage house was a repository for things people didn’t want anymore and couldn’t be bothered to sell. Miller had been the repairman in Bekel since he had finished his apprenticeship two years before, and he went there often looking for spare parts. He fixed cars, mostly, though people brought him all kinds of things—boats, hot water heaters, radios, farming equipment.

        Some said it was a dying trade, but the self-healing machines that were being promised in the capital—the ones that were supposed to usher in the “post-waste” era—were nowhere to be seen in Bekel, or in most of the southern corridor, for that matter. There, things were still made of regular metal, clawed up from the ground, and they rusted and broke, and Miller was going to fix them as long as someone

would pay him to do it.

        And it didn’t seem such a terrible fate, to be obsolesced. He thought about it sometimes—to have the world pass over him, to be left to the rhythm and silence of his workshop, to fix things until the things stopped coming and then to spend his days fiddling with his radio, or going for long walks in town, up to the surviving church, through the old graveyard and the shops, down to the river, every day like this until people stopped seeing him altogether, until he narrowed with hunger and idleness into one concentrated point, and there he would find it: a self, like an extract, like a green-glass bottle falling to the ground with a clink.

        But he didn’t think that would happen. The work was steady, and he could see himself staying in Bekel for at least a few years longer. There was something about the place that suited him—the kids rolling idly on bikes and wandering shirtless by the pier, the tourists mooring and unmooring their boats, the low brick houses shivering in their weather-beaten coats of paint.

        The salvage house itself was unpainted and made of stone, with a slate roof. The roof was new but the body of the house was old, and leaning imperceptibly; it seemed to extrude from the land like a callous or some kind of fungal growth. Beside it was a ditch full of wild grasses, their shaggy golden heads rocking in the wind, and beside that, a patch of raw earth where the old threshing machine had been. The windows were obscured by curtains from inside.

        It was a runtish building from the outside, but it seemed to enlarge as he entered, the walls falling away from each other. A thin layer of dirt stirred underfoot as he made his way to a window, opening the curtains, and the house’s one room filled with a dim, undulating light.

        A crooked telescope fixed Miller with its glass eye. The wall behind it was braced with shelves that someone had abandoned there years before. They had since been filled with things: sections of gutter, skeins of gold and copper wire, lamps in various styles, wrenches, jars half-full of fish hooks or buttons, a wallet, empty and open like a grinning mouth, a set of painted children’s toys.

        He surveyed these items before heading to a wooden crate in the corner. He needed a brake pad for a truck he was working on, and this was where the car parts usually were.

       In the strange and shifting topography of the house, there were only two constants: the computer and the old church windows that leaned up against the building’s right flank. These nobody ever took. Because nobody had a use for them, but also because it would’ve felt wrong somehow, violatory.

        The stained glass windows were from the church by the river that the district had demolished when Miller was a kid. There were four of them, and they covered almost the entire wall. The light seeping through them cast the space in a marbled glow. He knew the pictures without looking: a fig tree heavy with fruit. A mass of people, grey faces peering expressionlessly out of the chipped gold background. A swarm of interlocking blue and white figures. An infant in a coral necklace that laid like streaks of blood across its chest.

        The computer wasn’t a computer at all but rather a computer’s cooling system, the ornate shell it was supposed to wear: a cylinder of fragile brass tubing that branched upwards with vascular grace. When set on the ground, the contraption came up to a man’s waist. Its current position was on top of a cabinet in the center of the room, where it looked like a chandelier or an alien musical instrument. It no longer worked.

        He stood, pushing the crate back into its corner. No brake pad. He would have to take a ride and buy one.

        He cast a glance back at the house before he pulled the curtains closed and left, walking past the yellow roar of grasses as he made his way back to the road. The rain had started, and it came down in a fine, raveling mist, the grey sky pitching and yawing in the wind. He eased his motorcycle off the grass and back onto the asphalt.