Gutted

(The Fill-In-The-Blank-Version)

photo by Sanaz Kiesbye

We're ________ (gutting/eating/burning) the place.

It's June and the students have fled and we're ________ (gutting/eating/burning) it like it's revenge. The old ________ (high school/rats nest/pirate ship) is overflowing.

We need to expand, the foreman says, let's ________ (gut/eat/burn) it.

We cut, trample, take ________ (sledgehammers/bananas/Weird Al Yankovic CDS) to the cinder blocks. It's the kind of thing we fantasized about when, a few years back, we slouched in those desks, learning of the displacement of ________ (water/hormones/Weird Al Yankovic CDs).

Dave works here too, moving the rubble in a yellow ________ (wheelbarrow/rain slicker/tetherball). The wheel squeaks. We can hear him over our ________ (hammering/string quartet/Weird Al Yankovic CD), over the radio plugged into the wall. When we were in school together I hardly knew him, but now that we work together, we eat ________ (sandwiches/mystery meat/pirate ships) side by side on the bleachers beside the soccer field where neither of us played. Dave dropped out of ________ (college/a rats nest/heaven) after the first semester. He failed an astronomy exam; things worsened after that. I'm still in for a couple more years, coming home for the summer just to ________ (gut/eat/burn).

"Chips?" he asks, but I say no. Thanks.

At night, when my back aches and I spend most of the time in the shower trying to pick the ________ (dust/bananas/hormones) from my eyes and my nails, peeling away the layers, sometimes I call up old friends I find in the yearbook. I want to say, "Guess what I'm smashing up?" I want us to have a good ________ (laugh/cry/period of silence).

Most of them aren't home. Their parents pick up, don't remember who I am, then inform me that their son is off doing good works in a foreign ________ (land/car/pirate ship).

I want to say, "What happened? What changed? Did you say Iceland?"

Instead, I just hang up the phone and don't bother calling ________ (back/hormones/Weird Al Yankovic).