Moving Targets

by Will Marsh

3. Roofing:

I need to get a bucket of nails. And though my ladder is propped against the roof, I can’t step down to the top rung.

I turn my head, as if looking to the neighborhood for karmic backup. A tangled lot, a row of shuttered shacks, and our newly finished house, the pink cottage next door—all lurk behind a sunlit blur. The heat is psychedelic. It’s May.

A local staff carpenter, unloading tar paper from a truck below, cranes his neck. Detects hesitation. I taught him to tile, but he despises me. He knows this nonprofit is a shitshow. These houses aren’t homes for those who need, they’re advertisements for donation drives. To pay the office workers, with their email jobs and stress balls and mindfulness studios and sensitivity trainings. I don’t even get dental. Yet, to him, AmeriCorps is just another word for rich.

“Some of us are real ones,” he calls, pulling from a spliff. “And some of us are custers!”

I pray for compassion, but the words dart off like minnows as I stretch back my boot to the top rung. Gunfire pops by the bridge, probably a quarter mile away, and I jolt. My ladder’s feet slide through a patch of loose dirt, hiccupping downwards.

I tremble between roof and ladder, reaching for the side rails.

My hands only catch the air.

2. Siding:

In April, I laugh from the steps during lunch, mistaking pistol shots for fireworks.

But fireworks don’t pop so mean. They shouldn’t rattle the shipping container where we keep our nail coils and strips of cement siding and hardhats for volunteers.

I drop my paper plate—meatloaf, corn, and mashed potatoes—and wriggle through the sand, over loose bark and twigs and dead wood. I scratch my ankle on a nail. My two trainees breathe close behind. We round the corner of the house, leaning against a pylon, panting. I raise my fingertips to my lips.

Far off, a bridge stretches its legs across the canal, indifferent and blue.

1. Sub-Flooring:

A Baptist preacher and I nail plywood into two-by-ten joists, hip-hop booming from my stereo. At break, the man gestures with his coffee cup to the other side of the street. Barbed wire wraps around a massive plot of land. March flowers struggle through faded grass.

“Used to be houses,” he says.

“Well, glad I’m here to help,” I say.

He draws back. “This isn’t reality TV.”

I burn, switching the station to jazz.

0. Foundation:

First day of service, the week after Christmas, my manager takes me to watch the skid steers drive pylons into the mud. Shaved head, blue eyes roving, the human equivalent of a punch to the gut—he says the city has twenty years before it floods for good. We’re building symbolic houses in a fantasy town, constructing the future in reverse.

In the evening, after work, I drink and smoke by the railyard, new hammer against my hip.

Heaven blazes above me.

Will Marsh is a writer and musician living in New Orleans, LA. He grew up in Virginia, where he formed the indie rock band Gold Connections. He has published fiction in Hash Journal and poetry via In Parentheses Literary Magazine.