I live in an older subdivision. The houses were built in the 1960s. At the time they were built, people still believed in canning their own fruit and keeping vast vegetable gardens. The lots are large for this type of activity. Some of the older families keep orchards and vegetable gardens in the way that their parents had kept them. In the autumn the apple and pear trees ripen. Their grandchildren arrive and spend the weekend on ladders climbing the trees. Steam rises from their kitchens as they can the fruit and seal it with caps of pectin. I have fruit trees in my backyard, a row of pear trees and apple trees. The limbs had been painted white per the biological rationale of farmers. The fruit ripens and continues to sit on the trees after the leaves fall in the autumn then in late October the rotting fruit falls. As soon as it starts to overripe in attracts fruit flies and for a time I have trouble keeping the fruit flies out of the house. And then in the autumn when it falls to the ground, rats, raccoons, and sometimes even black bears slink out of the green belt at and gorge themselves on the fruit.

The first year in the house I cleaned up the fruit as it fell, but gradually I lost interest in this. The peripheries of my yard reverted to feral land. It was enough if I could keep the lawn mowed. The beds grew thick with weeds ad then native plants. The rose bushes grew thicker and denser. Blackberries began to appear at the margins, and I knew enough that I hunted them down and cut them at their source. I bought a viscous vegetable poison at the store and poured it into the root system.

My car broke down and for a time I had to walk to the bus. At one time my neighborhood was dangerous, a rotting working class neighborhood filled with people who had recently moved to the region and didn’t have money or roots. The houses were populated by rootless people mixed in with the isolated houses of the old people who had lived here since the development had first been built fifty years before. These old people stayed on their immaculate plots of land. The kept their mailbox in sturdy metal locking mailboxes. Their children who were old themselves tended to their lawns. Sometimes I would see the old people shuffling through the neighborhood with their walkers. I was friendly to them, and they were friendly to me. We smiled at one another and they would comment on the weather. A cold spell, they might say. Hope you have your pipes wrapped. And I did, although I didn’t wrap them but placed a handy Styrofoam cap with a kind of plastic holder in place. I cleared my gutter and finally as the first frost came I picked up the somewhat fermented fruit and dumped it into the compost heap.

Walking back from the bus I was aware then how dark my corner of the neighborhood was. Our development is at the lip of a plateau, a kind of rim that goes down into a swampy region where the old highway runs. At the upper edge of the lip the houses have a view of the water and the mountains. They are massive houses. They were well kept. The streets are well lit and have sidewalks, and as soon as you come down pass the lip you enter a region without sidewalks and the houses need to be painted. There is a massive white box of a house with shoddy roof repairs — exposed plywood — where their dozen kids are forced to keep their shoes outside in a massive shoe rack. I wonder what it must be like for them in the frosty morning to put on their shoes. Do they bring them indoors then and warm them in the hallway before they put them on? Or do they thrust their feet into the frozen shoes and begin to walk and gradually their foot becomes cold and the shoe becomes less frozen and by the time they reach school the shoe is okay? There are houses were people have just left in the middle of the night and left the landlord or bank to come around and examine the house and remove the detritus of the previous occupants. The house across the street continues to get people and then they are gone and notices appear on the doors and the cycle goes on and on through the summer and winter.

Coming home from the bus after work I was aware how dark it was once I passed over the lip of the view of water down into the swampy side of the subdivisions. The few streetlights had been knocked out. House lights had been burned out and not repaired. And at my corner where my house stood, it was dark enough to see the stars glittering like specks of ice in the sky.

For a time homeless people could be found living in the green belt above the swamp. They would move through neighborhood. In the construction site abandoned due to the hard times, they would sit on rocks and smoke their cigarettes and play music in the middle of the day. I envied them their carefree ways. My daughter was fascinated by the hobos and would note them on the way home from school. They never bothered us, but would wander the streets in the middle of the day and sit in the lawns of the vacant houses.

A police cruiser would troll the neighborhood.

Many years ago young run away girls who worked on the sex trade on the highway near the house had been the target of a killer. The killer abducted them and threw stores their bodies in vacant lots. The killer continues to have relations with the bodies even after he had killed the girls. These dumping grounds were found in the empty margins, the gaps of the suburbs south of Seattle. Our subdivision was constructed in the space between these gaps. There was the swamp that was just cottonwood, alder, and fields of cattails. At the end of cul-de-sacs garbage accumulated. Driving on the streets it seemed like every block was accounted for and held houses, strip malls, or apartment complexes. But this was illusion because in the gaps and margins of the streets there were canyons, rushing mountains streams, swamps, and vagabonded farms. The area was layered, each layer completely obscuring but hardly even affecting the layer underneath. There was the wild forest that continued to exist in the green belts and canyons. There was the farmland from a hundred years ago which continued to exist in working farms and large estates that had never actively removed the fields and culverts. There were the country estates of 80 years ago, the vast subdivisions of the 1960s, the apartment buildings and condos of the mid-1980s and late 1990s. Each boom in the region resulted in growth, and then sudden and abject stagnation during the bust. We were currently in the throws of national economic hardship, but the area between the Green River and Puget Sound had been in permanent crisis since the airport was constructed in the mid-1960s. This crisis required mitigation but could not be alleviated.

I noticed then in the first days of the New Year during a sudden break in the cold streak that thick blue bottle flies invested the back screen of my house. I took the broom and swept them away from the house. There were flies over the back deck. I swept them up. I noticed then there were flies in the air in great blooms and I could smell something, the smell of rotting meat. This is a familiar smell in the autumn when the rivers fill with salmon and the salmon breed and then die. For a month the rivers smell like old garbage. But that was several months ago now. I could smell this odor then of rotting meat coming from the woods behind my house. I went inside and grabbed a cloth and tied it around my mouth. I walked out the front door. The sun was a faint whitish spot in the powder blue sky dusted with the feathery trails of cirrus clouds. I had my jacket, but it was warm enough I didn’t need to button it.

I walked into the trail worn in the mud under the cottonwood. The bracken on the forest floor had turned orange. The leaves two were the color of rusted metal and mottled with mold. I passed on over turned Safeway cart. About five yards into the green belt behind my house there was the gigantic snag of an old Doug fir, likely one of the original trees in this area that was probably already a snag a hundred and thirty years ago when the first Americans came to this region to homestead. Someone had nailed something to the snag all of the way around. Whatever it was attracted the blue bottle flies and I realized I couldn’t tell what they were because they were covered in maggots. it was a tree of wiggling white maggot flesh and I could barely stand near it does the odor. I took an old bracken fern and brushed one of the objects free of flies and as many of the maggots as I could.

It was a hand. The tree was covered in hands that had been nailed it. The nails were fresh and treated I suppose to resist oxidization. Each one sparkled in the sunlight coming through the leafless branches.

I turned and made it about three yards before I vomited and then I was on the street and there were three of my neighbors.

“Who are you?” a woman asked. She wore a Lands End jumper and Nike tennis shoes. Her pants had a jaunty racing stripe on their side. Her lips were artificially full — collagen I suppose.

A man stood next to her wearing a Gortex rain jacket. He carried a long pole with a contraption at the end. It looked like a piece of fishing equipment that you might see at Big 5 or some sporting good store. He had short hair specked with grey. I recognized him as the man who walked his pit bulls as at dusk. Actually he jogged and the pit bulls, two huge grey animals, ran beside him like pilot fish.

“How do you do?” I said.

“Did you see it?” he asked.

“You mean that,” I said. And I gestured behind me. “Has someone called the police?”

“The police are no good here. Times are tough everywhere,” the woman said.

“I’m calling them,” I said.

“Do you have a phone?” the man asked.

It was a strange question. Of course I had a phone. And then he did something I didn’t realize was even possible. He thrust the stuck at me and the contraption on the end was a kind of spring that snapped around my torso wrapping my arms and limps together. It hurt enough I howled.

As I howled, the woman said, “You cannot return to this neighborhood.”

I wanted to say, “I live here!” but I was confused and howling.

The man shoved me and I tripped and banged my head against the asphalt. When I was aware again I was in a van. There was black plastic coating the walls ad the ground. “This won’t hurt,” he said. He stuck a needle in my arm and I felt fine. I felt fine all over and I tried to tell him I lived here.

“I live here,” I said only I could hear the sound coming out and it sounded more like “Oh Of Eee,” and he smiled me. He had very white teeth with no visible fillings. I imagined he had white fillings. And then I watched as he placed my limb and hand on a trey and then he brought a handle down. A blade extended from the safety. My hand fell off with a degree of pain although I could feel my body reacting — I shook and convulsed and black spots crept at the edge of my vision. He took the stump of my arm and brought it against a red hot metal plate. And I don’t remember what happened next. I woke laying on the median of the freeway. Cars went both north and south. I was missing my left hand. A neat bandage capped my left arm. I saw then six men sitting in front a feeble fire. They ate beans from a can. They were all missing their left hands.

“Hello, brother,” an old man said. He wore a tin pail for a hat. He wore a patched leather coat with spikes on the shoulder blade. I drank a cup of coffee with them. They were a grim lot, and hardly said anything. “How come the police don’t run you off?” asked.

“We’ve all been run off here,” the old man said. “This is it, brother. End of the line.”

After I drank the coffee and smiled at them. The coffee was horrible. It was some nameless, mass-market instant coffee and hadn’t been prepared properly. It was either too weak or too strong. The trouble with instant being it required the exactly right proportions. “Well that’s one thing I’m glad of,” I said. “I am glad I met you.”

“You wouldn’t have a dollar would you?” the old man asked. I reached to my pocket using my missing left hand. the gap, the missing hand was an annoyance to me. I felt like it was still there but there was just something wrong. The hobos around the fire looked at me and smiled. They all lifted their missing hands.

Using my right hand, I found my wallet and I was used to opening the wallet with two hands, but now I had to open the wallet with a single hand. I managed. I found a twenty and took that out and was able to tuck my wallet back into my pocket and then I handed to the old man.

He looked at it. “You okay friend? This is twenty dollars.”

“It’s what I have,” I said. I nodded my head and waited for a lull in traffic before I got to the shoulder. I walked until the freeway went over an overpass, and then I walked down to the cross street and walked through the streets familiar from driving. I arrived in my neighborhood and was careful not to be visible to anyone. When headlights came, I stepped into the shrubs. I returned to my front door and opened the door and there I stood in the front entry. I called 911 and explained what had happened.

Using my single hand I fixed myself coffee with a proper machine. The pain in my arm began to bloom and so I took some painkiller.

Finally there was a knock at my door and there was a policeman in his chipper uniform and walkie-talkie connecting him to the broader world of action. I invited him for coffee. We sat in my living room and I showed him my hand and explained what happened.

“Well that seems like a mistake,” the policeman said. “They should never have cut off the hand of a property owner.”

“There is an entire tree of hands,” I said.

The policeman and I walked to the side of my house. He took out his flashlight and there was movement in the forest. “Stop!” the officer said. He shone his high-powered flashlight a thick bright beam like a headlight into the bushes. There was the flash of a leg in a pair of trousers with a racing stripe. And then they were gone. A huge woof sounded from the forest and then the entire old Doug Fir covered in hands was on fire, tall stack of fire. We ran toward it and then stopped at the edge of the clearing.

“Fucking hell, what a fucking mess,” the policeman said. He called dispatch and told them he had a tree on fire covered in human hands. Could they send a fire truck and a forensic team, and maybe another team or two.

“Has someone looked at your hand,” the policeman said. He handed me a card was we walked back to his car. That is your case number. I held the card and thought about my fake hand.