VI

    At work, when we got around to knocking down the back portch, each grey-green pressure treated board was shot through with oily-looking golden nails.  Nailgunned nails hold tenaciously, because of the heat activated glue which coats them.  The friction generated by the gun melts the glue for a fraction of a second, and then sets around the nail.  This makes demolition slow going.  
    The rainbow-gold sheen on the nails is cadmium, a poisonous metal.  Objects are sometimes coated in cadmium to discourage welding to them, like putting a bomb in the refridgerator to discourage snacking.  Pressure treated wood is poison, too.  The old stuff has both arsenic and toxic copper oxide, which is why all playground equiptment is made from it.  
    The telltale sign of copper poisoning is a green ring in the iris.  Victims suffer from severe mental disturbance, including suicidal behavior.  It's common knowlege that arsenic is lethal in large doses and carcenogenic in small doses.
    The first wood to go was the railings- we needed room to huck the rest of the structure down to the ground.  These are fun- a few smacks with a sledge hammer and they break away from the posts, trailing ballisters like a fishbone.  After that, it was top to bottom- the roof, hot and rotten shingles, tar and plywood.  Then the meager joists.
    After that, the ledger board.  These were the wide 2x8's that were actually hooked to the building, providing a solid shelf and nailer.  It was here that the alcoholic housepainter did an especially excessive job with the nails, sensing that he was mostly nailing through to rot.  Each plank of wood, some of them nine or ten feet long, bristled with bent spikes.  This was vampire refuse, as if we were demolishing Elizabeth Bathory's gazebo.
    We were working in the heat of the summer with shorts and t-shirts, throwing the stuff off the second story into the back yard.  I knew that this wood wanted to stick me, and I was careful, a wuss in a non-wuss job.  It was only later that week, when Mark 1 construction dropped off our new dumpster, that it finally caught up to me.  I was loading the last stick in.  It twisted in my hand, came down, and slashed my calf, just like it wanted, leaving a long, deep cut.  
    "Someday," it said to me, "You too will be demolished."