by Aaron Burch
Like most days—like almost every day, save the occasional morning when, because you had a drink or three too many or because you went on an extra long run or because you did a few hours of yardwork in hotter-than-normal heat or because of any number of other factors that sometimes make you tired enough to sleep in—you wake up an hour or so before your girlfriend, give or take, and you’re quiet getting up out of bed and quiet tiptoeing out of the room and quiet moving your way down the old, creaky stairs, and you open the downstairs freezer and take out the pint glass that, the night before, you filled with ice from the upstairs refrigerator ice dispenser so it would be waiting here for you and your morning ice coffee without having to get ice while your girlfriend sleeps in until her alarm, and you open the downstairs refrigerator and take out the giant, Costco-sized bourbon bottle that, the day before, you filled with the leftover half of your pot of coffee, because every two or three days, give or take, you make a full, large pot of coffee but your girlfriend doesn’t drink coffee and even though you drink a lot of coffee (too much? maybe), “maybe too much” coffee is still only about half of a large pot of coffee, so you save the rest for this, your morning ice coffee, which is of course just refrigerated stale, day-old drip coffee, and you fill your pint glass with the ice in it with the bourbon-bottle coffee and you spruce it up with sweet cream creamer that you splurge on because it makes it all something of a treat, a kind of morning liquid dessert, be it fresh coffee or this day-old leftover stale coffee or anything in between, and it’s more expensive than normal half and half but sometimes life it about treating yourself and also you usually stock up when it is on sale—in fact, you have two of them in your refrigerator right now, because they have a long fridge-life and one of the last few times you went grocery shopping your girlfriend had a coupon—and you take your ice-coffee-slash-morning-liquid-dessert to your comfy chair for your daily practice of trying to read a short story every morning in the quiet of the house, because that is one of the ways you treat yourself, because there can be something special, and even magical, about small quiet moments and little rituals like morning reading with your coffee, but then that quiet is disturbed, there’s some loud construction noise outside, and you remember your neighbor texting you the morning before that a tree company would be coming in the morning to take down the big tree in his backyard, and you read your daily morning short story and you drink your daily morning coffee and then you hear your girlfriend’s alarm and you go upstairs and kiss her good morning and you go to the back doorwall—a word you’d never heard before your girlfriend, you’d always just heard it called, and called it yourself, a “sliding glass door,” and you don’t know if it is a Michigan thing or a “her family” thing or what but for a long time you couldn’t remember if the word was “doorwall” or “walldoor” and you always guessed wrong, always said “walldoor,” and your girlfriend always laughed at you, and now you do remember but you still usually say “walldoor,” because you like the sound of it and because you think it is funny to be wrong and because you like it when your girlfriend laughs at you—and you open the curtains and outside are five or six men all working together to take down this giant black walnut tree, and you marvel at the one way who has climbed his way high up into the tree, climbing with the agility and a lack of fear of a young boy climbing a tree one-half or even one-quarter this size, and then you notice the chainsaw just dangling at his side, a chainsaw that he grabs and wields and uses to lop off a giant limb of the tree, and two or three other workers down on the ground use a system of ropes tied and looped and pulleyed, all to lower the limb exactly where they want, and none of it looks safe, but it all seems to be happening so systematically that it feels safe, and in the current political climate and state of the world and news cycle and et cetera et cetera, it is hard not to notice none of the workers are white, and you don’t want to overgeneralize but you think about how none of them are wearing helmets, or even gloves, there’s no company name on their truck or any of their t-shirts, and you wonder where they are from and what they are charging to take down this tree, and you just generally start thinking about the idea of work—the idea of work in America, and the work happening right now in front of you while you watch, and the work you do as a writing instructor, and the work of an instructor vs. the work of a professor, and the work of being in the classroom vs. the work—and you remember an essay you wrote years ago, over five years it must be (how can that be? Where does time go??), you realize, because it would have been before COVID, a long-single-sentence essay about administering an in-class freewrite and looking out the window and seeing two men with a saw taking down a large tree in your university's Diag, an essay about watching your students work, and these men work, and working alongside your students by freewriting about watching these men outside work, and you think about the similarities and echoes and rhyming action of this moment and that, and you start composing sentences in your mind (“Like most days, you wake up an hour or so before your girlfriend…” and “You remember your neighbor texting you the morning before that a tree company would be coming in the morning…” and “You remember an essay you wrote years ago…”), and these sentences come to you in the second person because that previous essay had been in the second person, and you remember running into a professor (Peter Ho Davies, if you want to be name-drop-y), in the hallway last semester and talking about how your classes were going and telling him a lot of your students had responded negatively to the story you assigned that was in the second person but have almost all written a story in the second person since, and telling him you love second person, and telling him you’re currently shopping a novel in the second person, and him telling you he loved it too, and him saying this thing that sounded so simple but kind of exploded your brain and the way you think about second person, “the second person is just first person in denial,” he said, and that has stuck with you ever since, and you thought about the ways that made sense for a lot of the second person stories your students had written, and the ways that made sense for the novel you’d written in the second person, and you wonder how that might apply to right now, to these sentences you keep composing in your brain while watching these men work, these sentences you’re typing now, weeks later from all of this happening, these sentences you—reader you, not first-person-in-denial you—are reading right now, assuming this got published and you are reading it, and tomorrow you’ll revisit that last “watching men take down a tree” single-sentence essay and you’ll discover it wasn’t actually in second person, you’d misremembered, and you’ll think some about memory and things misremembered and things forgotten, but right now you just keep watching, and marveling, and feeling hypnotized, and then your girlfriend comes and watches next to you, and she comments on how crazy this all is to watch, and how amazing, and kind of how magical, and you agree, because it is crazy, and it is amazing, and it is magical, and sometimes these small, daily, utilitarian actions of work are the most magical moments of all.
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Aaron Burch's next book, Tacoma, will be out from Autofocus Books in Feb. '26. He recommends "The Unified Field" by Tyler Dempsey, one of his current fave CNF writers.
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