Free Another Perfect Catastrophe by Brad Barkley

of narrow beds and long hours of work equaled adventure. During the days we worked the skid trail, chainsawing the downed trees into eight-foot lengths, walking across the rows of logs under a high, dark canopy, with everything—the air, the logs, the ground—soaked with moisture. Sugar worked as a ballhooter, stepping across the logs, pushing them with a pole hook into neat bundles. After two days we could work in silence, the best way, speaking with only our eyes and nods of the head. The trees columned upward under a sky dark gray and marbled, the ground under our toe spikes needled, leaved, soft.
    One late afternoon, a Thursday, I motioned Gil to back up the tractor to a bundle of logs and guided the winch while Sugar stepped across and looped the choker cable around the bundle. He looked at me to hit the winch as the motor started grinding. I stepped back with a pole hook to guide the bundle into place and as I moved away I watched the rubber bindings on Sugar’s right boot come unstrapped, the spikes left behind, stuck in the log, and his right foot slipping down inside the choker just as the winch gathered the cable into its slow tightening. I looked at him as if seeing him there would tell me that nothing this wrong could possibly be happening, and his eyes held me, his mouth open and words splitting out of him as I moved toward the winch to hit the shutoff and saw the cable pull slowly through his jeans just above his knee as his other leg bicycled against the stack of wood and noise poured from his mouth, his hands grabbing at nothing, and the cable insisted its way into his flesh and I heard his bones as my hand found the red button and Gil, white-faced, exited the truck and clicked on his walkie-talkie. I didn’t move, could not move. Sugar’s eyes held me. My own eyes, still new to this silent language of work, found no words to give him, and I looked away.
the tough questions
    â€œWhy are we still together?” I ask. Lyndsey is readying for the Hen House, and I watch her slip on a T-shirt, zipper her skirt. “I mean, why are you with me?”
    She sighs. “How did you get this old and stay this dumb?”
    I shrug. “Easiest thing I ever did.”
    She shakes her head, pulls on her Hen House sweatshirt. If she follows her plans, in two years she will be making four times what I make now. “Because I love you, Reed. The oldest reason there ever was.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œYou aren’t supposed to ask why about love. You’re supposed to let it stay a mystery. That’s the rule.”
    I nod and watch her clip her hair up to keep it out of the catfish filets and cole slaw. “Love isn’t such a mystery, really.”
    She cuts her eyes at me. “No?”
    â€œNot for me.” I shrug again. “A soft, warm body, a bed where we talk in the dark, your little TV smile on Friday night. Where’s the big mystery?”
    She shakes her head, frowns. “Well, that’s shallow of you.”
    I know that she is no great believer in mystery, either, that this is just something you say about love when you are twenty-three years old. Her parents held little love but more mystery than most see in a lifetime, a dad shedding jobs almost weekly, a steady march of repossessors, and a mother who could not stop stealing eye makeup or cans of soup or 45s from the record store. Lyndsey turned away from all of that, left it for good at sixteen, and now every step of her existence is planned out—career, vacations, the life she wants with me. She left mystery a long time ago and has not looked back.
    I look at her. “Why shallow? Who says love can’t be made up of real things? If there is any mystery, then that’s it; there isn’t any.”
    She walks over, takes my chin in her fingers. “Try as hard as you can to make sense.”
    â€œListen, you wonder about how we spend our days, let me tell you. A couple months ago I