The Sudden House by Jeffrey Utzinger   Out the window, her son field dresses a deer strung from the low branch of a sycamore tree. Before the first hard freeze, he will disappear into the trees to join the stream of young men intent on skirmishes, or perhaps push west beyond obligation. The son does not yet know this, but the mother does. He was such a nice boy, the neighbors will say, polite to a fault, misguided, but not by anyone we knew, then or now. The crowd he must have fallen into. What they also won’t know is he lives inside a house inside his head. A sudden house with white peeled paint and a swayed black roof, a sprung gutter that moves in the wind like a railroad gate gone haywire. Even now, his thoughts move like a skipped stone, put in motion by his own volition, lifting and falling, beyond his control, accelerating until the original idea fades from view, leaving in its wake fragmented, concentric, ephemeral thoughts. An upright piano sits in the middle of the living room of the sudden house. He blows dust from the yellowed keys and plays cadenzas from concertos, first dolcissimo, then fortississimo. He does not know these terms, but he knows the thrill of defining them. The neighbors will recall he sang in the church choir, off key, but with conviction—he understood there is power in the blood. What he does not understand is the moment between being of sound mind, and slipping into shithouse mouse crazy, when the left eyeball bulges and the hair springs askew. The difference between coincidence and significance. That if he loses the smooth stone of his own ideas, something must rise from the murky waters to take its place. The son looks up, sees his mother in the window, sees a white hawk wheeling over the rooftop, trailed by a dozen frantic blackbirds. He disentangles his fingers from the innards and mess of his daily work, and folds them, for a moment, into the spaces between the hawk’s outstretched wings.

The Sudden House
by Jeffrey Utzinger

Out the window, her son field dresses a deer strung from the low branch of a sycamore tree. Before the first hard freeze, he will disappear into the trees to join the stream of young men intent on skirmishes, or perhaps push west beyond obligation. The son does not yet know this, but the mother does. He was such a nice boy, the neighbors will say, polite to a fault, misguided, but not by anyone we knew, then or now. The crowd he must have fallen into. What they also won’t know is he lives inside a house inside his head. A sudden house with white peeled paint and a swayed black roof, a sprung gutter that moves in the wind like a railroad gate gone haywire. Even now, his thoughts move like a skipped stone, put in motion by his own volition, lifting and falling, beyond his control, accelerating until the original idea fades from view, leaving in its wake fragmented, concentric, ephemeral thoughts. An upright piano sits in the middle of the living room of the sudden house. He blows dust from the yellowed keys and plays cadenzas from concertos, first dolcissimo, then fortississimo. He does not know these terms, but he knows the thrill of defining them. The neighbors will recall he sang in the church choir, off key, but with conviction—he understood there is power in the blood. What he does not understand is the moment between being of sound mind, and slipping into shithouse mouse crazy, when the left eyeball bulges and the hair springs askew. The difference between coincidence and significance. That if he loses the smooth stone of his own ideas, something must rise from the murky waters to take its place. The son looks up, sees his mother in the window, sees a white hawk wheeling over the rooftop, trailed by a dozen frantic blackbirds. He disentangles his fingers from the innards and mess of his daily work, and folds them, for a moment, into the spaces between the hawk’s outstretched wings.