PLYWOOD

hen my father brought out a large beam of plywood that my brother intended on using to make a. I turned my head back and saw the bend of the plywood, the bend of my father’s arms, ready, tinted teeth grinding and blending with the sawdust. I heard the wood speak to me then. The wood told me about its time in the East: about its cousins and how they loved to practice contortion; about the shape of the most beautiful logogram it had ever seen, and how it had always been jealous of paper for being the canvas for a thing that could somehow encapsulate even more than the space it consumed. My mother, half closing her eyes, never made it clear whether she was speaking to me or to my father. My father struck me as the type of man who wouldn’t understand.