Associate editor Andrew Walker on today’s short: While reading Lewis Milholland’s “Hypotheticals,” I can’t help but look around my space and imagine all I would lose in a fire—the curling snake plant that sits by my window, a table crafted by an old friend, countless unread essay and poetry collections. In such a brief space, “Hypotheticals” forces us to consider the importance not of the things we surround ourselves with, but the stories that tie those things to us and what remains when they’re gone.

hypotheticals

After Dad’s house burned down I stopped using my windshield wipers. I like how the rainwater swallows up the glass and smears taillights into the red streaks of a Renoir painting, because it makes me feel as if I’m melting.

I won’t bog you down with details. I’ve been driving without maps and taking old cattle roads. My undercarriage is ruined. Last week I took a bunch of mushrooms and sat cross-legged and naked in front of a mirror. I was looking at my Adam’s apple and the back of my knees, all the parts I wish I didn’t have. Sometimes my body and I are just work friends.

I've been collecting responses that answer more than one question.

Like:

If your house were on fire and you could rescue only one thing, what would it be?

And:

What is the worst possession you’ve ever lost?

My friends don’t play properly, they treat it like a riddle to solve. “My childlike sense of wonder,” Trey jokes. Carla sputters that she knows, she’s got it: “A house!” I tell Cassie I've always loved her Hope Diamond shirt. She says it’s the first time she’s ever worn it.

Today Dad is wearing a shirt he bought at Target. We’re walking on K Street near the White House and he’s talking to me as if I’m his peer. He has to, he’s living with his parents and I'm not.

Dad’s been dodging calls from unknown numbers for months. At first the calls were from the bank, asking him to please pay his mortgage. Then came the notice that his house had been sold, and he had sixty days to vacate the premises. Dad wasn't there. He was in rehab, or else off drinking somewhere.

The final call was an opportunity to get his stuff out before the estate cleanout men came through. But Dad didn’t get that call. He was off drinking somewhere.

Dad lost all his clothes. He lost his TV, his cooking pans, the plants upstairs, the plants downstairs, his knives, his lathe, the bowls he’d turned in our sawdust-coated garage, the little bit of weed left over from when Mom was alive, his birth certificate, the Christmas tree he hadn’t taken down since 2018, his print of “A Girl with a Watering Can,” his phone charger, the pillow of his favorite Premier League team my ex had sowed, his bed, my bed, my Pokémon cards, my Harry Potter books, my shoebox filled with letters from my ex that I never told him about.

“I know you're not materialistic,” my dad breathed, coming to a complete stop as we rounded the manicured corner of the Treasury Building, “But I am fifty-eight years old and I don't own anything.”

These days, I like to ask people what one thing they’d rescue from their burning home.

Then I ask them if they’d take it as a clean start. If they’d feel devastated or restored. The funny thing is, everyone answers the same way.

Lewis Millholland is a DC native whose writing explores the tension between transience and permanence. Professionally, he’s covered small-town news, worked a stint on Bloomberg’s news automation team, and programmed video games. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at Boise State University. He tweets @lewisthefifth.

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