Spinning Pins

The weaver helps the painter remove the rear shocks from his car.

This involves crouching inside the hatchback, hoping her long skirts won't brush the oil on the seats and the carpet, holding vice grips on the top of a bolt while he strains to turn a wrench on the nut.

She breathes and remembers, earlier in the day, listening to the call of a pileated woodpecker--itself the aural equivalent of the pecking action, a repeated stab inside a small swath of trees near the creek. The bird's ike-ike-ike-ike went on steadily for a minute or more, with variations climbing and falling slightly through pitch and tempo, here a bit more frantic and there more lax. But, also, it seemed the bird was turning or flying around within an area roughly car-sized. The direction of its voice kept changing, and the reverberations shifted and made different colors and rooms among the woods. After a while the bird left its spot and struck off downslope, still calling, and the house its sound had been making turned into a road, swift and directional, falling away behind itself.

The painter gets the nut free, panting.