Same shit. Same jokes. Same rhythm.
Only now I’m standing in a borrowed patch of Maine woods with bare feet on cool tile instead of pulling on my boots in the bunkroom while somebody curses at the coffee maker.
I should leave the chat.
I’ve told myself that a dozen times. More.
Every time the screen lights up, it peels something open. A reminder that the world I gave the best years of my life to keeps moving without me. The calls still come in. The rigs still roll. The kitchen table still fills up. The job doesn’t pause to mourn my absence. It closes ranks and makes room for the next man.
That’s how it has to be.
Doesn’t make it easier to swallow.
My thumb drifts to the top of the screen where the group settings wait.
Leave conversation.
Instead, I lock the phone and set it face down on the counter harder than I mean to. I stare at it for a moment, jaw tight.
Leaving the chat won’t change anything.
That’s the problem.
It will just make it real.
By the time I step out of the RV, the phone is still face down on the counter.
Dan
The chainsaw bites into the fallen birch with a dry, hungry snarl.
Sawdust sprays across my boots. The smell of fresh-cut wood lifts sharp and green into the warm July air. I ease off the trigger and the engine winds down to a throaty idle.
“Clean cut.” Tom nudges the cut section with his boot. The trunk rolls a few inches across the dirt path and settles against the moss.
I shrug, flexing my fingers. “Tree was already half rotten.”
The trail curves ahead through pine and low brush, narrow but well-worn from years of people walking down to the harbor overlook. The storm two weeks back dropped half a dozen trees across it. Enough to turn a nice morning walk into a climbing exercise.
Tom plants his boots and lifts the far end while I drag the saw out of the way. We shove the trunk off the path together. It lands in the brush with a dull crack and a spray of needles.
Sweat runs down the back of my neck. My shirt sticks between my shoulder blades. The air smells like sap, dirt, and the faint mineral tang of the ocean drifting up from the harbor. It beats the smell of gunpowder, sand, and death.
Tom wipes his forehead with the back of his forearm. Even pushing sixty he moves like a man who spent his life doing hard work. Broad shoulders. Thick forearms. The kind of steady strength that doesn’t waste motion.
He glances at the trail behind us. “Not bad for a couple old guys.”
“Speak for yourself.”
He grins.
We work a while without talking. The rhythm settles in easy. Cut. Drag. Clear branches. Stack them off the path so hikers don’t trip over them later. The chainsaw roars, quiets, and roars again. Birds scatter away overhead when the engine kicks up.
Manual labor has always been the easiest kind of quiet.
We finish clearing the smaller branches and move farther down the trail. The downed trees lie in a crooked line through this stretch of woods, one every twenty yards like someone knocked them over on purpose. Tom stops at the next one, a thick spruce laid across the path at waist height and gives the trunk an assessing look before setting the chainsaw down to refuel.
By the time he pulls the cord again, the engine catches on the second try and the clearing fills with that familiar mechanical snarl.
