My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

This is the rough draft, when I’ve made the changes I’ll erase this warning. Feedback welcomed.

A house settles down like an old man in a chair, and the years give it a lean, the parts grate against one another and all corners wear down. An empty house sitting empty from death in a family, a final generation dead in the ground or hard times turning a family away from their shelter, more hopeful under the stars than in that pathogenic home.

This is where the carpenter found himself. An old home, broken windows cataracting, liver spots of bare wood coming up through faded skin of paint. The house was empty, save for the carpenter and his tools.

His tools were instruments of healing. With a jack he raised a corner of the basement, up in the attic rafters were strengthened with fir planks, insulation pumped between walls gave a new warmth to a creaky shivering carcass, like a strong nip of whiskey would throw heat into thin blood.

At night he spent the longest time sharpening his tools. Blades on chisels, teeth on blades, the razor edge of planes. Tools of a remodeler. Someone with patience. Someone who will work around past mistakes.

A chisel has many edges. To cut with ease the back is flattened. It does no cutting but must be smooth to allow the bevel to slide into the wood. The gross edge of the blade is hollowed, then an angle instilled into the steel along the tip of the hollow edge. When the tool was maintained his work felt good. He was so intimate with what he held in his hand he could sink it or raise it like the wood was water and the steel could float in it. Work was enjoyable.

There were mysteries that remained, of course. An old thing will look one way on the surface, but years instill surprises. The carpenter dug into the framework of a building with bright eyes of exploration. The carpenter needed to read the danger before it came. Thin nails without heads were highway-men, they could rob the tool-steel edge of all its value. Like bitter insults they sunk into the wood skin to wait, they came out at him violently, as though the carpenter were a stranger touching a sore spot.

This was the house. It played cruel jokes on him, putting stone where it shouldn’t be, hiding rot where there was no water. It was an old man, tired of living, almost ready to die, letting those younger than him suffer his tricks his last curl of zest. Being ripped open was a pleasure, all his wounds were testaments to his trials, and this carpenter was like a confessor, there to hear every last transgression done unto him so he could do unto others. Do unto the carpenter.

The carpenter slept in the empty house at night when his work for the day was done. Wind howled at him through the flue of the chimney, sounding bitter and vicious. An old blanket of patchwork fought back while he slept. Spirits from within the space came to look over his body as it moved in the rhythm of sleep. Spirits of the elements that were stripped from the earth and brought into new forms at the hands of men years ago. The wood from forests, even things men don’t consider to be alive, the silica in the glass, the oil in the paint on the walls. These were spirits that remembered.

The carpenter heard voices in his sleep, his dreams gnashed at him, he woke in the morning. A woman was gone from him. He considered her responsible for the terror of night.

Carpentry can be a dangerous profession. As a saw bites into wood the wood might pinch and spit the saw back out, back at the one who set it in its forward motion. On a roof one could slip, under a house something may collapse. A web of power runs behind the walls, hidden and hiding in wait for the steel tip of a tool.

As this house killed the carpenter he could not understand it was happening. He thought this work would heal him; rebuilding this old home to firmity, loving something abandoned, wouldn’t that restore his own strength?

But the house was slowly choking him, dulling his mind, waiting for him to weaken. Then it put the sharp blade in the Carpenter’s hand and let him take his own life. The Carpenter had no idea. He believed, as the blood ran from his neck, that the thoughts of the woman had distracted him. He was a patient man, and as life pooled around him and became something else he tried to figure out where he made a mistake, so he wouldn’t make a mistake again. He wouldn’t. He would never be given the chance.