Another Pair of Hands

By M. Arbon

Daniel has a little fixer-upper house to go with the new-life-in-progress he's building after a car accident derailed his old one. Sure, he's never even changed a washer before. Sure, he's teaching himself home repair from books and YouTube. Sure, the proprietor of the nearby architectural salvage place is out of his league in more ways than he can count on one hand. None of that matters, because Daniel doesn't need help. He's doing fine. (It's fine. He's FINE.)

But as Daniel paints kitchen cabinets and plasters the cracks in the walls and hangs a holiday wreath in his draughty front window, he gradually realizes that even if he doesn't need help, he's ready to aim for better than fine.

This 11,000-word novelette was previously published in Shousetsu Bang Bang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Arbon
• Release date: Dec 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781989089163

M. Arbon

M. Arbon writes stories, mostly queer, often sexy, about people who try hard not to be jerks. M. lives and works in Toronto, Canada. M.'s stories have appeared in the anthologies His Seed and Best Gay Stories 2017, as well as being published as stand-alone volumes.

Book preview

Another Pair of Hands

M. Arbon

Thirteen Flowers Press

Another Pair of Hands

By the time Daniel got the thing called the bonnet nut unscrewed and the thing called the faucet stem pulled out, his hands were sweating badly enough to slip on the wrench handle. He rubbed his palms on what had been a decent pair of jeans, several months of home ownership ago, and looked from the gunky cylinder of metal to the slightly blurry image frozen in the centre of his laptop screen.

The size was about right. The shape was about right. The level of grossness was higher than expected. Daniel wiped the cylinder with a cut-up old T-shirt and poked dubiously at the wad of scored rubber at one end. That was the thing he had to replace, apparently. He dropped the entire piece into a ziplock bag, grabbed his coat and his cane, and headed down to Queen Street.

On this Saturday afternoon, the hardware store was hopping. Daniel made his way past a couple brandishing paint chips and arguing about what colour chartreuse was and someone testing the heft of snow shovels, and found his way into the aisle of plumbing supplies.

Washers, confirming what the video had told him, did indeed come in a variety of shapes and sizes. He scanned through the selection of little plastic packages three times, but nothing looked quite like the black rubber disk he was looking for. Eventually he managed to flag down a red-aproned teenager, who led him back to the same section, glanced at the wall of packages, and said, Yeah, no, we're out of those.

Okay. Thanks. Daniel shoved the plastic bag back into his coat pocket. His leg was showing signs of having had enough of this handyman posturing for one day, and the next closest hardware store was a ten-minute streetcar ride away on a weekday, never mind the TTC's archaic weekend schedule, and there was a gaping hole where his kitchen tap had been—

You could try across the road, the kid said.

Across the road?

Yeah. Hart's? It's just across and a few doors down? The one with the wooden stars in the window? He's got all kinds of stuff.

Gentrification had made tentative inroads into this part of Queen, but in between the coffee shops and artisanal butchers, there were still second-hand appliance places and storefronts with nothing in them but curtains and dusty plants. Daniel had walked this strip plenty of times since his move, and never really noticed the shabby 1920s facade with its garland of wooden stars and string of star-shaped vintage Christmas lights. Now he saw the neatly lettered sign propped in the window, black Sharpie on the end of a peeling old plank: J. HART, ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE, HARDWARE, BITS AND BOBS.

A bell, a real brass bell on a curl of metal over the door, jangled as he entered. The store had an antique shop's smell of wood and dust. To his left were shelves, to his right a many-drawered cabinet, index cards written by that same hand tacked and tucked where they would be visible: Doorknobs, locks, hinges, keys; Switches and switch plates; House numbers and door knockers.

Hello, a voice called from deeper in the store.