Fast typing - "Blue Noise"

Belly to branch, the sapsucker drills the maple’s well, drumming the trunk, its red throat thrumming.

I hear its work before I see it, willing myself toward the cadence, scanning the tree.

The sounds stop. It’s spooky—this shift to nothing—being completely narrowed, a finished thing.

My father rattled me like that: behind a bedroom door, the loaded thrust of his threats hammering our walls with vibrato.

Worst was the ghost note, that muted tone that, like wind threshed suddenly against itself, obscured the sum of my mother.

I could hear her, almost, in the fissure between fear and fight: shirtless, as she made a break for the hall, her damp hair twisted up in a towel now spilling rivulets, wet sheen of a wing erupting into flight.