Tiny Horror

The humid July air in Antioch always felt thicker than it did on the Northwest Side of Chicago. For twenty years, Julian and Valerie Garrett had congratulated themselves on the migration. They had traded the narrow, brick grid of Portage Park for a sprawling colonial built in the late 1970s, backed against a deep glacial kettle pond. They raised their kids here, watched silver maples grow tall enough to drag branches across the shingles in high winds, and grew used to the midnight choruses of bullfrogs vibrating through the floor joists.

Twenty years of comfortable occupancy breeds a stubborn kind of blindness. It makes a man treat a patch of marshy dirt like an absolute kingdom.

"Julian, you're obsessing," Valerie said, looking up from the landscape designer's rendering on her lap.

"I'm staging," he said. He leaned his elbows against the railing of their stained pine deck, pointing the sweat-slick base of an iced tea glass toward the lawn. "Right there, where the slope drops off. That's where the pavers run. Seating wall sits along that contour. No more wrestling the push mower along a thirty-degree incline once the stone is down."

Valerie ran a fingertip over the rendering’s fountain basin. "And the arch? Tell me we're finally hauling that thing out."

His eyes drifted down to the shoreline.

Partially drowned in the reed-choked shallows stood a heavy, Victorian wrought-iron archway. The house was straightforward late-twentieth-century suburbia, but the iron belonged to an older century. The empty frame opened straight into the black water of the pond. Rusted perimeter fencing branched out from both sides, black and pitted, driven deep into glacial silt. For two decades, they had treated it as a gothic lawn ornament. They hung petunia baskets from the iron cross-members, pulled creeper vines off the scrollwork, and ignored the dead stillness of the water within its curve.

"First thing on the schedule," he said. "Mini-excavator can wrench it out with a tow strap in ten minutes. It breaks up the line of sight anyway. We've lived with someone else's taste for twenty years, Val. Time to clean the property lines."

He had the spreadsheets locked, the stone backordered, the elevation drops surveyed. He would run the site himself on weekends and sub out only the heavy block work.

Between his plans and an excavator’s bucket was a single counter visit at the Lake County building in Waukegan. A routine grading permit.

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