The pegboard and its hammer-shaped absence

A single glance from the garage doorway takes in everything the pegboard holds, tool and absence alike, where the tool chest, with its drawers and its lid, would keep the same secrets for months. The pegboard announces a missing wrench immediately: a hammer-shaped outline with no hammer inside it, traced years ago in the same marker used for the level line, the socket set, the pliers now hanging exactly where their silhouette says they should. Many are outlined by a house's previous owner, a habit inherited along with the garage itself, and maintaining one becomes less a matter of organization than of translation, since several outlines no longer correspond to any tool currently owned. A crescent-wrench shape holds a slightly smaller adjustable wrench, close enough not to bother correcting. Two outlines, a small handsaw and something narrower that might have been a chisel, have held nothing at all for years, and no one has traced over them to make room for what actually exists. There is a particular kind of order that persists after the thing it was ordering has gone, an outline holding its shape around an absence. The two empty outlines read less as gaps than as reservations, held for whichever future tool happens to match, though nobody has ever explained why a chisel-shaped space gets to keep its reservation this long while everything else in the garage gets sixty days before it is deemed clutter.

Marion Vale