Some Assembly Required

By Charlotte Newbury

When God first approached me in the joinery aisle of the hardware shop, I was twenty-four years old and very tired and thought she seemed somehow both too tall and not at all tall enough for a cosmic being, but when I opened my mouth to say something to this effect she held up just one finger and laughed (like the sound of a train brake screeching a whole town away) and I knew she’d already understood, so instead I said “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” somehow already on the verge of tears in that stupid, brightly-lit store filled with people all consulting their incomprehensible lists of 25mm copper-coated and w56 h76 and aluminium 50 per s/m while I stood and stared longingly at the wooden planks and prayed for some kind of divine intervention to show I was even in the right aisle, despite knowing I didn’t belong here at all, not in this spot or the shop as a whole; I wasn’t prepared, hadn’t even measured the space I needed to fill, had arrived with only the hope that I’d intrinsically understand the perfect measurement and end up back home a hero of DIY, an unexpected talent - and during all this pondering, God handed me the timber I needed (quite large) and said, “Darling, you must simply cut it to shape.”

Charlotte Newbury is a queer writer from England who knows next-to-nothing about DIY, life, or everything in between - though it doesn’t stop her tweeting @charnewbpoet.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.