Shaun pulled up to his gate, getting out to put the combination in the dial-lock so he could undo the chain. Stuffed in the oxidized chain-link section of the gate was a letter from someone claiming to be Samantha’s lawyer. It claimed that in three days, she was going to take custody of the house, as well as Shaun’s befurred companions. Fucking bitch! Not only did she never make any contributions to the house, financially or otherwise, in the few months she lived there, but she never gave a shit about anyone else. Not any more than she cares about any person or animal, which is as long as they are useful to her. If selling them or neglecting them or ‘putting them down’ whenever they’re inconvenient is the criteria, then I guess you’d call her an animal lover. What she really loves is manipulation and control, which is why she’s using the kids against him.
Closing the gate behind him, but not bothering to refasten the chain or lock, Shaun raced up the dirt-and-gravel driveway to the house. After checking that the children were there and everything was in order, he sat down in the office chair he keeps next to an old desk outside, smoked a bowl, smoked another bowl, then smoked another bowl, waiting for his heart rate to get back to somewhere under one-hundred bpm. Knowing what he had to do next, it took a while to level out. Phone calls would make him anxious enough, but there are few calls that are worse to make than to the courthouse.
How is this even possible? He’d signed the divorce papers over a year ago. They agreed to part ways semi-amicably. He’d keep the house – she couldn’t afford it anyway, and she’d get the RV and horses and other ‘things’. That should have been that. Somehow she’d made some kind of change or amendment without him knowing.
The woman on the legal self-help line was surprisingly self-helpful. She told Shaun where to find the forms online for an emergency hearing. Obviously, it couldn’t have gotten this far without several court appearances. Court appearances Shaun had never heard about.
Samantha’s mom, Susan, was the guru of narcissistic gaslighting to her daughter’s postulancy. Without even having the clerk look it up, Shaun knew Susan was the mastermind behind this. The archaic court system still requires papers be served in person or via US Post. Like, it’s too easy for people to lie about not receiving digital communication in the era of servers and Patriot Acts, but a signature on a piece of paper is proof of mailing or serving documents. People have to be doing this every day in every county, but the courts don’t catch on. Or more likely, they encourage it. That’s the problem with allowing scumbag divorce lawyers and criminal prosecutors to become judges; they project all of their political bullshit on everything. Nobody can be guaranteed a fair trial when you have the most corrupt, double-dealing, braindead, charlatan, capitalist-puppet, fucktoads on the bench. No time to dwell on that now, Shaun thought, thanking the woman politely for her kind help before hanging up the phone.
While on the phone with the courthouse, Shaun was texting to make arrangements for the family to stay somewhere far away, with someone Samantha had never heard of, for a couple of weeks while this all played out. House or no house, the kids were staying. Not just for Shaun’s sake, but for each other. They’d been a pack through several moves and life-changes. The fact that Samantha wanted to split them up from each other after abandoning them for a year should tell you all you need to know about her.
Whatever plans Shaun had for the weekend were shot. The next day, Friday, he got up early. Well, he always got up early, but usually he’d enjoy the sunrise over the Sierras with a coffee, sketchpad, and morning wake-n-bake. This time, it was straight to the shower, then a suit. No tie. After taking the pack eighty miles in one direction, he had to head fifty miles in another direction to get to the courthouse relatively close to opening.
“Oh, I remember you, sweetie,” the middle-aged clerk said, looking at the notes on her screen about their phone conversation yesterday. “Go find an open computer station and I’ll be over shortly to help you.”
Shaun tried to find a cubicle as far away from everybody else as possible. Flashes of judgment went through his mind. His parents telling him all of these people were dirtbags. Mostly because they’re brown, but also because they’re poor. No self-respecting American would dare go to court without a conniving attorney. Shaun reminded himself that all of these people, like him, were there to help rectify some problem in their life. Some problem caused by another person, likely someone they once trusted. Some problem that was, no doubt, exacerbated by the whole legal system.
Before Shaun could dive too deep into his Freudian analysis of the racism instilled in him at a young age, the clerk came over to show him which forms to print and what to do with them. You know the drill. Open the online query, put your personal information into little boxes, print it, sign it, take it to the counter to be recorded and stamped. Rinse, repeat.
Once all of the paperwork was complete, Shaun had to have someone serve Samantha with the notice to appear in court for the emergency hearing the following week. For a moment, he considered making up a fake person and signing the paperwork himself. Though, in the end, he had the papers served and the documents completed the ‘right’ way. The legal way, at least. It’s neither ethically right, nor the most efficient and consistent way to do things, but what do you expect? Judges around here would probably still be wearing syphilis wigs if it were approved by their sponsors.

When all of the bureaucracy was in order, six hours later, Shaun found his way back to the parking garage and sat in his idling car, wondering what to do with his weekend now. It was a waiting game – until the court-date on Tuesday morning. Go home and protect the property by himself? He considered packing. If he was going to get evicted from his own house – the house he owned and made the payments on – he’d better be prepared to move out if things went sour on Tuesday. It wouldn’t be the shortest amount of time he’d had to pack and move before, but it was certainly the most stuff he’d ever owned. Furniture and appliances. Things that don’t pack into a suitcase or a couple of old Amazon boxes.
Turning the corner from the courthouse parking garage, Shaun stopped at the overpriced Mediterranean chain and ordered a falafel and hummus wrap. He didn’t eat it, he had no appetite. It was something he’d bought in a nugatory attempt at maintaining his health.
He headed south on the freeway twenty miles and pulled off to get gas at the super-cheap station on the outskirts of the next major city. After filling the tank, Shaun went inside and got two-for-one Red Bulls and a pack of cigarettes. These were strange purchases for him. He’d quit smoking several months ago. As far as the Red Bull, that had to be at least a decade. Maybe two. Shaun never liked the energy drink buzz. Too methy, too tweaky. Coffee, as long as he didn’t overdo it, was his drink of choice. Those days he’d spent drinking three or four pots of coffee and smoking copious amounts of weed, creating art all day, we’re some of his favorite days. But his body always paid for it later. That’s age, Shaun thought. He used to be able to go out drinking all night. Now he got a hangover from having too much ice cream before bed.
Sitting in his car behind the gas station, Shaun chugged the Red Bull with one hand while packing the cigarettes against his leg with the other in a rhythmic waltz-like pattern. He tore the cellophane wrapper from the box and pulled out the little fake-aluminum flap that covered the cigarettes. After taking a deep drag, Shaun repositioned the cigarette to between his pinky and ring fingers. He lifted a glass pipe with some fresh purple indica to his mouth and lit it, the cigarette hanging below the bowl in his outer fingers. It was a struggle to get a good flame. Despite a thick callus on his thumb pad from years of lighting pipes and bongs, it hurt to press the flint roller on the Bic lighter. I’ve probably been smoking too much lately, he thought.
Finally breaking from his tunnel-vision, Shaun looked up to see an employee on their break in the car next to his. It was obvious they’d seen this last transaction that he had had with himself, but they didn’t seem to care, turning back to their phone while taking hits from their own resin vape.
Having sufficiently steadied his nerves, Shaun slowly edged out of the parking stall and directed his car back to the freeway on-ramp. One might think, given the situation, Shaun would be speeding and driving aggressively, but no. He’d never been a risky driver. Always letting others merge, never flipping off assholes or blaring his horn. Just a genuinely nice guy. Not a “Nice Guy”™, though. Maybe when he was younger, he’d get upset. Like the world owed him something. Relationships are hard at that age. You’re not sure what you want out of life yet – though, you’re certain you’ve got it all figured out. You get into a relationship because you have these infatuation feelings, but when you see that person for who they are, how they don’t fit into your plan, chaos ensues. Your mind reminds you of who they used to be. You’re sure they can be that person again. Nevermind the investment of however many months or years. The time and energy that you’ve put into the relationship. So instead of doing the logical thing and being alone, people persist. They get angry that the person they’re with isn’t the person they dreamed up in their mind and then expected them to magically become. It all took too much energy and was counterproductive to his own peacefulness, so Shaun preferred to let people have their egos and their anger. His goal, upon leaving the house, was to get back to his pack and his solitude. Or solitude, as it were, with the pack stashed two counties away.
Back home, Shaun changed the combination on the gate lock and added another lock – one that required a key. He stashed it behind the near-fossilized fencepost – where it would be difficult to cut without getting an armpitful of barbed wire. He found the motion light and camera that he’d ordered when he bought the house, but never installed, in the back of a cabinet. Removing one of the patio light-fixtures, Shaun wired the camera in and spent several minutes struggling with the mounting bracket, which was designed in the 1980s, without the foresight to see that anything besides a lamp might ever need to go there.
Maybe I should just let her have the house, he thought. The equity isn’t that much. Was it worth his sanity? No, it’s not fair, but it’s life. When they say, “Life’s not fair,” what they really mean is you’re gonna get screwed, let’s see you do something about it. Sunk costs. That’s what they call it in economics class. Colloquially, it might be referred to as crying over spilt milk. Once you take a loss and there’s nothing you can do about it – nothing legal, at least – you may as well divert your energy toward future endeavors.
On a usual day, when everyone was home, there were plenty of quiet periods. Or so he thought. Sometimes, they’d chase a squirrel into a hole up on the hill or bark at the neighbor’s horses if they got too close to the fence. Most of the time, everyone just chilled. The shepherds roamed the property. The littles hung out on their couch downstairs. Nevertheless, the house felt eerily silent when Shaun finally settled into the chair in his office. He really didn’t want to spend his time doing it, but he had to search his archives for anything he could use in court. For one, records of all of the house payments coming out of his personal bank account. Receipts for all of the improvements he’d made to the property. If those weren’t enough, he pulled up Samantha’s taxes from the couple of years they were together. Where she didn’t claim cash payments and wrote off a bunch of stuff that was definitely not a business expense. Unsure what else he had that would be of any use, Shaun copied all of the files to a flash drive to have printed when he went to visit the kids that weekend. Aside from the multitude of books and notepads around his house, he’d been paperless for fifteen years. The courts still operated in the seventeenth century, though, so he’d have to bring a folder of actual paper to ‘prove’ something or the other. You’d think those dumbshits would have heard of Photoshop by now.

After a quiet weekend, hiding out with his family, Shaun was up before the sun and on the road to the courthouse in Samantha’s county. The work he’d put into compiling the financial paperwork was for naught. The judge refused to look at them or give him a chance to speak in his defense when Samantha made up lies about his character­­. This was exactly what Shaun had expected. He’d only been to court a couple of times in his life and the experience was always the same. Misandry from egotistical, geriatric fools dressed in black tablecloths who thought they knew everything. Shaun agreed to sell the house and give Samantha half if he got to keep the “family dogs”, as the People-Versus-Larry-Flint-looking judge would accentuate. Whatever. He just wanted to get as far away from those toxic people as soon as possible. From the moment you walk into a courthouse, you can feel it. It’s palpable. If radioactive green sludge were an aura, you’d be drowning in it. It’s like an old monster B-movie. Once you’re in the sludge you can feel yourself transforming. If you don’t escape, you’re going to become part of it. The Thing.
Shaun escaped from the parking garage, determined not to let Samantha see him. Luckily, he’d got a new car since they’d last seen each other, so unless she was looking for him, she wouldn’t have noticed. She was never very observant, unless she was going through his phone.
Once he was out on the main road, Shaun stopped worrying about it. Given their history, he’d more-than-half-expected her to jump out in front of him and accuse him of hitting her on purpose. Planning on taking the rest of the week off from work, Shaun got on the long, featureless freeway. A couple of hours in one direction to get the kids, then back up the hill to start packing. For real this time.