Listen to The Hole
read by Sarah Carson
If you ask him his life story, he will start it very late (he suspects that everyone does this, but cannot prove it without some more extensive research). It begins with the first time he put his hand through the dry wall, how surprised he was by the emptiness of the space inside, how unsatisfying the dust felt as it trailed from his wrist. This feeling that followed him from moment to moment—the Tigers lose the pennant, the neighbor installs a swimming pool, his oldest son tries to jump in front of a train. It bothers him, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He uses a ruler to draw several timelines, but they all come back here: inside the hole—where his fingers graze the wires that run to the ceiling fan, where he worries that the electricity can get inside of him, where he realizes that it won’t and thinks about doing it again.