An inventory of what remains, what doesn’t, and why I find I’m not particularly bothered about the difference

The latch on the shed door was bent outward from the inside, which is the detail I keep returning to. Not forced from the outside — from within. Whatever entered through the gap beneath the left-side panel, which has been warped since the ice storm three winters ago and which I have been meaning to address for approximately as long as I have lived in this house, had managed to exit through the door itself. That requires either considerable strength or a working familiarity with simple lever mechanics. I am not ruling out either.

I discovered this on a Tuesday morning in late October, thermos in hand, having gone out to retrieve a tarpaulin I wanted for a drive up to Cherokee County later that week. The tarpaulin was gone. So was a coil of orange extension cord, a pair of leather work gloves I had genuinely been looking for since August, and a plastic bin I used to store miscellaneous hardware — hinges, picture hooks, a handful of screws in three different sizes that I had been keeping on the grounds that the right situation would eventually present itself. I stood in the doorway for a while. The morning light was good, as it usually is on that side of the house. I looked at what remained.

Community Notice

What Remained

Two storm windows, leaned against the back wall since 2021, when I removed them to replace the weatherstripping and then did not, in fact, replace the weatherstripping. A reel mower with a broken drive cable that I have transported between two residences on the understanding that I would have it repaired, a plan I now recognize as aspirational rather than operational. Approximately four decades of accumulated intention in various states of decomposition: a ceramic pot with no drainage hole, three paint rollers, a socket set missing the three-eighths, a crate of back issues from a regional folklore quarterly that folded in 2014. These things were undisturbed. Whatever came into my shed made selections. That is not nothing.

It didn’t trash the place. It took specific things and left. In my experience, that’s not animal behavior. That’s more like someone moving out.

— Della Pruitt, neighbor, Asheville, NC

Della Pruitt lives two houses east and keeps a kitchen garden that backs against the tree line. She is seventy-one, a former county records clerk, and the kind of witness I would drive four hours for in any other context. She told me she had heard something in the night — she estimated between two and three in the morning, though she acknowledged she had not checked the clock — that she described as ‘deliberate moving around, not scrambling.’ Her husband Terrence, who was also awake, agreed on the deliberate quality. He said it reminded him of someone loading a truck. I wrote that down. I wrote all of it down. There are three other neighbors who reported seeing or hearing something in the surrounding forty-eight hours, which gives me five witnesses in total across a two-block radius, though I am aware that five witnesses to adjacent events is not the same as five witnesses to a single event, and I try to be careful about that distinction.

I should say for the record that I have no confirmed identification. I am a reporter, not a taxonomist, and the gap between ‘something came into my shed’ and ‘the chupacabra came into my shed’ is one I would ordinarily be the first to flag. But I have been working this region for nine years. I have the Hollow Creek files. I have a sealed evidence bag in my boot that I am still giving time to develop. And I am aware — professionally, specifically aware — that the western North Carolina corridor has documented activity that fits a particular behavioral profile, and that profile includes nocturnal approach, selective interaction with human structures, and an apparent interest in materials rather than food sources. I am not making a definitive claim. I am noting a correspondence.

The gloves I might understand. The tarp I might understand. But why the hardware bin? That’s the one I’d want answered.

— Terrence Pruitt, neighbor, Asheville, NC

Terrence is right about the hardware bin. It’s the detail I don’t have a framework for yet, and I have learned over the years to treat the detail I don’t have a framework for as the most important one in the room. Ruth Calloway told me that once, in different words, sitting at her kitchen table in 2017 with a cup of coffee she had made for both of us and which was better than mine, if I’m being honest. She would have had thoughts about the hardware bin. I find I think about what she would have said fairly often when something doesn’t fit.

I am going to repair the latch. I am going to address the warped door panel this time, because I have now been given a concrete reason to do so, and sometimes that is what it takes. I am not going to replace the storm windows or the mower, because looking at them squarely in the aftermath of all this has clarified for me that I am never going to replace the storm windows or the mower. The shed will be cleaner for what was taken. I am choosing to read that generously. Whatever came out of the tree line and into my shed on a Tuesday night in late October, making deliberate movements that sounded to Terrence Pruitt like someone loading a truck, and left through the door on its own terms — I hope the tarpaulin is useful. I hope the gloves fit. I genuinely, without irony, hope it found what it was looking for.