Pack Plywood
Aaron Joseph Young | Fiction, Summer 2026
Come to find out that most of what I owned during that lost year was garbage once it came time to actually move it, and this included perhaps most unremarkably a piece of a sheet of plywood. I had only needed all of its flatness once for I don’t know and I would certainly not start needing it once I got to where I was going. And even if not true, what I had was no way to pack plywood. I overheard at a restaurant once that people often looked like their pets, but from measly experience this didn’t strike me as true (and how about those who struggled to keep just one animal fed?) I thought instead it was cars that really told on you, and mine had a stereo that gouged question marks into choruses. Passenger door hinges that had begun rusting. A trunk that only opened half of its way.
So it was along with all of the other garbage I owned during that time that I leaned the plywood and all of his flatness against the can for garbage and its collection. So he might stay upright I snuggled into him the widened hips of a boxed fan. Because neither of them moved, I could imagine between them love.
A thought, then: I had finally taken to playing dolls, and my family would be proud. My clothing in that lost year all drooped thickly and amorphous. The sort that seemed to eat the wearer and the parts of himself he did not claim, merely carried. But even still, what you should try to do is understand that the summer before my life could start was the sort of hot that smeared everybody stupid. The already stupid into prophets.
So it seemed that everybody still included me. Though this did very little to make me feel better or much of anything else.
Inside again, and there was more garbage in the house than I had thought. There would always be more garbage in the house than I had thought.
When I returned to the end of the driveway with the last of what I could confirm I owned during that time, the plywood was gone. It hadn't impressed so much as a softness into the dirt. Venture to guess that a neighbor had taken it. I did have those. Overly ambitious couples who found they never knew each other at all and that they would like to keep it that way once the lease was up. Pre-patent families under the supervision of fathers who would make a face that meant hi. Their strolling hours were always my fugitive. I would look down. I knew my body and my voice agreed on very little and so I tried not to make witnesses out of anyone I did not have to.
At some point the construction had stalled and also the dust. The air I recall as having been greased with only half of a heart. I found at the end of that driveway a moment for just myself. I was not sure what I was expected to do with moments that were mine alone so I took to imagining:
—it was one of those fathers who had taken my plywood. I said silently that there is something about men. Those peering down into the middle age, those a specially who think they are still peering down into the middle age, when it comes to a plywood found in places of typically no plywood.
I would have bet the plywood was sitting already in a garage along the side of other plywoods. But it would not be forgotten there. A father would leave the house and fancy himself a builder, a conqueror, and also a mathematician. This wood of his he could erect, if not other kinds, and divide the world up smaller.
If he so pleased. Whether or not he actually ended up doing so was an irrelevancy. I had thought this habit was only my father’s. Then I thought it was my father and also my mother’s husband. My father and my mother’s husband and also the boyfriend of my sister. Come to find at the end of my first driveway it was every other man.
I kept on with my own hoarding:
—there is a club for all of these men who keep the plywood of men like myself in their garage. This pack plywood meets often and the meetings are long. Too long and in a good way. They discuss their favorite pieces of plywood. Not why they are the favorites, but just that they are. They needn’t explain themselves. These men have all invented names for one another. It is no more a chore to abide by them than it is to drag home somebody else’s plywood.
Because there is a club for all of these men who pack plywood, the days impend instead of simply dragging by. In the days before pack plywood, and also after, these obnoxiously reserved, intimately unreachable men corrode into private fits of giggling. It rattles the earshot wives and fills the bags of the children. But it matters very little, so long as they still stroll every so often and there are men like myself to see it. They have found a family that only asks for their scraps.
I say there is something about men. But if I had gotten to pack plywood, I bet there’d be something about me, too.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“I lived in my first neighborhood my senior year of college. Not a dormitory, and not an apartment. So this time was my first among the horizontal people and not the vertical people. I slept next to one of the city’s busiest roads, across from a facility where they broke rocks. I don’t know what for, just that they broke them. Our lawn was sand.”
Aaron Joseph Young holds a BA in Film Studies & English (Creative Writing) from Michigan State University, where he was also a recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize and Jim Cash Award, among others. He is currently based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He can be found on
Pack Plywood
Aaron Joseph Young | Fiction, Summer 2026
Come to find out that most of what I owned during that lost year was garbage once it came time to actually move it, and this included perhaps most unremarkably a piece of a sheet of plywood. I had only needed all of its flatness once for I don’t know and I would certainly not start needing it once I got to where I was going. And even if not true, what I had was no way to pack plywood. I overheard at a restaurant once that people often looked like their pets, but from measly experience this didn’t strike me as true (and how about those who struggled to keep just one animal fed?) I thought instead it was cars that really told on you, and mine had a stereo that gouged question marks into choruses. Passenger door hinges that had begun rusting. A trunk that only opened half of its way.
So it was along with all of the other garbage I owned during that time that I leaned the plywood and all of his flatness against the can for garbage and its collection. So he might stay upright I snuggled into him the widened hips of a boxed fan. Because neither of them moved, I could imagine between them love.
A thought, then: I had finally taken to playing dolls, and my family would be proud. My clothing in that lost year all drooped thickly and amorphous. The sort that seemed to eat the wearer and the parts of himself he did not claim, merely carried. But even still, what you should try to do is understand that the summer before my life could start was the sort of hot that smeared everybody stupid. The already stupid into prophets.
So it seemed that everybody still included me. Though this did very little to make me feel better or much of anything else.
Inside again, and there was more garbage in the house than I had thought. There would always be more garbage in the house than I had thought.
When I returned to the end of the driveway with the last of what I could confirm I owned during that time, the plywood was gone. It hadn't impressed so much as a softness into the dirt. Venture to guess that a neighbor had taken it. I did have those. Overly ambitious couples who found they never knew each other at all and that they would like to keep it that way once the lease was up. Pre-patent families under the supervision of fathers who would make a face that meant hi. Their strolling hours were always my fugitive. I would look down. I knew my body and my voice agreed on very little and so I tried not to make witnesses out of anyone I did not have to.
At some point the construction had stalled and also the dust. The air I recall as having been greased with only half of a heart. I found at the end of that driveway a moment for just myself. I was not sure what I was expected to do with moments that were mine alone so I took to imagining:
—it was one of those fathers who had taken my plywood. I said silently that there is something about men. Those peering down into the middle age, those a specially who think they are still peering down into the middle age, when it comes to a plywood found in places of typically no plywood.
I would have bet the plywood was sitting already in a garage along the side of other plywoods. But it would not be forgotten there. A father would leave the house and fancy himself a builder, a conqueror, and also a mathematician. This wood of his he could erect, if not other kinds, and divide the world up smaller.
If he so pleased. Whether or not he actually ended up doing so was an irrelevancy. I had thought this habit was only my father’s. Then I thought it was my father and also my mother’s husband. My father and my mother’s husband and also the boyfriend of my sister. Come to find at the end of my first driveway it was every other man.
I kept on with my own hoarding:
—there is a club for all of these men who keep the plywood of men like myself in their garage. This pack plywood meets often and the meetings are long. Too long and in a good way. They discuss their favorite pieces of plywood. Not why they are the favorites, but just that they are. They needn’t explain themselves. These men have all invented names for one another. It is no more a chore to abide by them than it is to drag home somebody else’s plywood.
Because there is a club for all of these men who pack plywood, the days impend instead of simply dragging by. In the days before pack plywood, and also after, these obnoxiously reserved, intimately unreachable men corrode into private fits of giggling. It rattles the earshot wives and fills the bags of the children. But it matters very little, so long as they still stroll every so often and there are men like myself to see it. They have found a family that only asks for their scraps.
I say there is something about men. But if I had gotten to pack plywood, I bet there’d be something about me, too.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“I lived in my first neighborhood my senior year of college. Not a dormitory, and not an apartment. So this time was my first among the horizontal people and not the vertical people. I slept next to one of the city’s busiest roads, across from a facility where they broke rocks. I don’t know what for, just that they broke them. Our lawn was sand.”
Aaron Joseph Young holds a BA in Film Studies & English (Creative Writing) from Michigan State University, where he was also a recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize and Jim Cash Award, among others. He is currently based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He can be found on