By Cuffed Locked
It was a Friday afternoon when I wandered over to Caleb’s garage, as I had dozens of times before. I usually stopped by on Fridays. We had one of those neighborly routines, not quite friends, not quite strangers, but something in between. I’d wander over with a beer and a story from the office. He liked my stories, and I liked watching him work. It was easy. Today, the late-summer heat was thick in the air, and the sound of Caleb’s tools echoed out into the driveway, clinks and whirrs like music he didn’t need speakers for.
His place always looked like the inside of a junkyard exploded and reorganized itself into a workshop. Piles of wires, wood scraps, old appliances taken apart and half rebuilt into God knows what. There was a sort of madness to it, but Caleb had a talent for rigging up stuff that worked. Dangerous stuff, sometimes. Genius stuff, always.
He was working on some half-dismantled snow blower, even though we were still a few months out from the first frost. That was Caleb, always two steps ahead, always building something, fixing something, or taking something apart just to see if he could put it back together better. He was shirtless, and his forearms flexed every time he twisted the wrench.