The Shed Desk
#20 of 52 Fictions: A Story a Week for 2026
Brandon could count on his fingers the number of people he knew who liked asking for help, and his father was not one of the fingers; his dad was as far away from the fingers as possible. So it was a surprise when Dad called one day and asked for help moving a desk.
Brandon went, and Dad showed him the desk. It was a gift for Mom, and it was beautiful. Dad had built it himself, over months, from maple with all wooden joins, with a beautiful grain brought out by a stain and coated and sanded to butter-smooth. It was also really big. Brandon said, “Dad, this won’t fit.” Both the front and backdoors of his parents’ house had strange, small entryways with tight turns, the result of multiple, amateur remodels over decades.
“I’m not stupid,” Dad said. “I know how to use a measuring tape. You think I’d spend months working on a desk for Mom without making sure it will fit?”
They carried it to the backdoor, straining with the weight. Then they spent an hour turning it one way and another. They took the door off the hinges. They took the molding off the doorframe. Brandon cussed. Dad grew redder and redder.
The front door was hopeless, but they carried the desk around the house and tried it anyway. Mom came to watch for a minute, then went on serenely. Brandon suddenly had a suspicion that she didn’t really want the desk. Possibly she had even encouraged Dad to make it bigger so it wouldn’t fit.
It was very close, a problem of less than an inch. But it did not fit.
Dad had recently built a large, new shed in the backyard, and after moving around the lawnmower and the snowblower, there was room for the desk. Dad said he would take the desk apart and make some adjustments. Brandon could see that this would be troublesome, since there was no way to take it apart without disrupting the pristine finish. Nonetheless, it was doable.
But weeks and months passed, and Dad didn’t do it. It would take energy, and it seemed he had run out of energy for the project. Or something. He didn’t want to talk about it. When Brandon asked, Dad scowled and changed the subject.
Years went by. When Brandon went into the shed to retrieve a tool, he found the desk in the far corner, covered with a tarp, tools and bins and wood scraps piled on top.
He had told his siblings about the shed desk. Rob, Brandon’s brother, once tried to tease Dad about it. “How’s it going with the desk?” Dad scowled. “Oh sorry,” Rob said. “Mustn’t mention the shed desk.”
Brandon found that he thought about the shed desk more often as time went by. It seemed to him that the shed desk was not the family’s only shed desk. When Rob went through some long legal process involving embezzlement charges, which the family only learned about when he made quick jokes that made clear he would take no questions—another shed desk. When his sister Lucy married a fitness trainer only to get divorced a month later, and she announced that she didn’t want to talk about it, this was also a shed desk. Brandon himself had some issues with alcohol, which he didn’t care to talk about, and in fact he felt that they owed it to him to not talk about it, since none of them talked about their shed desks.
One time he tried to bring it up with his parents. He described the shed desk metaphor, and he said, “We have a lot of shed desks. Maybe we shouldn’t have so many shed desks.”
Dad scowled. Mom moved on serenely. So, even the shed desks were a shed desk.
Along the way Brandon had gotten married. He was making good money. They bought a nice house with a big room for Brandon’s office. He called Dad, and he said that he’d like to take the desk, the shed desk, the one he’d built for Mom.
“Oh, I got rid of that years ago,” Dad said. “I sold it on Craigslist for $70 to a young man who said he was opening a new law practice. He seemed very nice.”
To his own surprise, this enraged Brandon.
Brandon had never yelled at his father before, but now he yelled. “You trained the whole family to behave this way, to hide and bury and shed desk our embarrassments, and it’s made all of us into hiders and obfuscaters and shed deskers, and it’s slowly eating at all of our souls!” He argued several iterations of this theme before he finally wound down. He listened to the phone.
Finally Dad spoke up. “Brandon, have you been drinking?”
Brandon hung up on him.
He put the phone aside and went for a walk. He understood what had happened. He was shed desking the original shed desker. If he wanted Dad to talk about his things, then all the things would have to put out in the open. He winced. Well, he thought, maybe tomorrow.
An aside: Around 2011-ish I was in a small, occasional writing group with Brian Kiteley and Cort McMeel. I had some stories to share, while Brian and Cort were working on novels. Tragically, Cort died in 2013, far too young. He was one of my best friends, a man of incredible passion and energy, and I think of him often. Now, years later, Brian has completed and published his novel, and I was moved to open the acknowledgements page and find Cort’s name. It was a reminder to me that Cort and his work and his passion are still with us.
Brian’s novel, Jack & Emily, is a literary spy novel and love story, set in Greece in the 80’s. It is finely wrought and built with a profound sense of place and silences that speak loudly. You can feel in the book’s pages how Brian spent years evolving its form and phrases. Check it out: Jack & Emily.
Background and implorements: I’m on a mission to write and post a story a week for 2026. Check out this article about the project in Westword!
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This story is by Nick Arvin. Check out the previous stories. The fabulous illustrations for these stories are by Erin Schoepke/Lunascape Photograpy. See more of her images here. Follow her on Instagram. No AI was used in creating this story or the illustration.
Shed desk needs to be in the OED! And DSM-V! Good story!
Loved this—and got a whole shed desk full of shed desks. Also amped for Brian's latest!