smoke rolls out beneath the door of his studio in the side-yard. With one hand masking his face, he reaches for the knob. The hot metal scorches his palm, so he wraps his hand with a bandanna from his back pocket. He grabs the knob again, and turns. Through fear-stricken eyes, Paul watches it transpire. Tongues of flame licking at the ceiling tiles of a window-less garage, burning the photography equipment and melting paint from the walls, exposing and purifying. Specters emerging from folds of smoke, then vanishing behind curtains of fire. Like a nervous magic lantern, he thinks. Above the deadened air, amid the cracking sparking popping, the roof begins to cave. Blinded by the blaze, Paul retreats to the darkness of the road, man and child silhouetted against a flaming edifice. *** Laved in sunlight, Paul and his daughter watch a crew of hardhatted men raise a wooden frame upon a square of burnt earth. The day is typically autumnal, warm and damp. Paul holds Cindy in his lap as they sit on a blanket in the backyard. She grows restless in the confines of his arms and begins to squirm. Eventually, she breaks free and sprints away squealing, her sneakers crushing brittle leaves of red and gold and orange. A pile of spare lumber lies next to the construction site. Paul conceives a tree house in the fork of one of those sycamores overlooking the pond. He pictures the rungs fastened with nails to the thick plates of bark, a rope-swing for jumping, knots for climbing. Large enough for two people, maybe three. It would be, for his daughter, a world to herself: a space to pretend, a place to relax, somewhere to hide when suppertime calls her home on a hot summer evening. A tiny voice interrupts these imaginings. Cindy is yelling out to her father from near the pond’s edge. She demands that he watch her carefully. She raises her short, thin arms above her head, bends her neck down, and hurls her body into a cartwheel. She loses her balance in midturn and falls on her knees, leaving two bowl-shaped imprints in the grass. Cindy looks down disgustedly at the mud on her jeans. Paul laughs and leans back on his elbows, head tipped to the sky, eyes set on stray clouds passing, the sun shining through morning gauze. A tree house.
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