For his grandson’s wedding, Franklin wanted to give him something strong and sturdy—something that would last. So he made a coat rack out of a tree.
It took him five months. Most of that time was spent looking for the perfect tree. He wandered the woods behind his house, scouting, but no tree seemed good enough. They were all too small, with trunks too fragile and branches growing at awkward angles. Some showed insect damage.
Then he found it. A black locust with a trunk like a pillar and bark ridged like armor. He asked his lumberjack friend about the tree. The friend said black locusts are robust and rot-resistant, but gnarly and hard to work with. It would take stamina to hew by hand. Franklin said that was just the kind of tree he’d been looking for. His friend helped him cut it down. The rest, Franklin did himself: he stripped the bark, sanded it smooth, let it dry, treated the wood, filled any cracks with epoxy, drilled angled pilot holes, selected branches for arms, screwed them in, bolted on a base, stained the surface, and coated it in clear polyurethane for long-term durability. The finished coat rack weighed 72.4 pounds. Franklin couldn’t carry it to the community hall himself, so come wedding day, he hired a moving company. Before the men loaded it up, Franklin snapped a photo of the rack with his new instant color Polaroid to keep as a memento.
After dinner, once the wine had made everyone jolly, Franklin overheard his grandson and granddaughter-in-law talking in the hallway.
“Can you believe it?” she asked. “He gave us a tree. A tree!”
“I know,” his grandson said. “At least we can leave it by the side of the road. No need to haul it to the dump.”
“Good point,” she agreed. “It could be worse.”
* * *
For the first six months of their married life, Marianne couldn’t throw the coat rack out because her grandfather-in-law was still alive. It would be in bad taste, her husband argued, especially now that the old man was so brittle he had even been missing their weekly Sunday brunches. Later, she couldn’t throw it out because her grandfather-in-law had died, leaving it in even worse taste.
We’ll make it work, her husband said. Marianne had married him for his certainty and resolve. He had a strong sense of what he wanted and an even stronger sense of how to get it. Arguing with him was useless.
So they looked for the right spot. It was too large for the entryway, too wide for the hallway, too outlandish for the terrace. After some back and forth, they decided to hide it behind the door, which, from then on, never fully opened.
Marianne wanted the wretched thing to disappear, so she covered it in whatever she could find: her scarves, cardigans, hats, aprons, a canvas tote filled with more totes, the laundry bag, two umbrellas, a set of wind chimes she’d failed to find a place for on their terrace and that sang whenever the door fell shut. Marianne’s winter coat hung from the rack even in the summer. When they got their dog, she looped his leash around the trunk like a necklace, and when she got pregnant, she added a baby carrier like a backpack.
One branch Marianne reserved for her husband. He only ever hung two items, and never at the same time. He wore his peacoat to work. When he got home, he exchanged it for his knitted V-neck vest. “I’m like a snake,” her husband joked, “I shed my skin to suit the setting.”
Marianne learned just how true that was the day she discovered a coat check tag in one of his pockets. The logo on the front said The Fox’s Hole, above the image of a cartoon vixen with cartoonishly long lashes. She found the name in the Adult Entertainment section of the Yellow Pages between a place called Legs & Eggs and another named Dolls after Dark.
That night, there was a lot of crying and screaming. Her husband said it had been a fun night out with the guys, nothing more. Marianne only calmed down once he promised he’d never go back. Three weeks later, she discovered a long blonde hair on his coat. The same day, she grabbed her sharpest kitchen knife—the one she used for slicing meat—and cut off the branch reserved for her husband. The blade slipped several times. Once, it caught her skin. She didn’t stop until the branch finally gave. The knitted vest landed on the floor, and Marianne left it there. The branch she threw in the trash.
“What happened to the rack?” her husband asked when he got home that night.
“I did what you said,” Marianne replied. “I made it work.”
* * *
It was a day like any other—until Jeanny sent the seventy-pound beast that crept behind the entry door crashing to the floor.
The fight had begun the way all their fights began. Her mother had scolded her for tossing her jacket aside instead of hanging it up. Jeanny had done it on purpose. Jeanny always did it on purpose, leaving her jacket in a new place every time: on the kitchen counter, over the back of a dining chair, draped over the dog bed, on her own bed, on her parents’ bed, stuffed between couch cushions, hung from a doorknob, on top of the laundry basket, slumped over the stairway banister, on the porch railing—even inside the pantry once, just to see how long it would take for her mother to notice. The only spot Jeanny kept returning to was the floor in front of the coat rack. The wooden tiles were too welcoming, too tempting, right there next to where her jacket was supposed to go.
“Pick that up,” her mother said, pointing at the jacket as if it were trash.
“What if I don’t?” Jeanny teased.
Her mother said something about grounding her, about extra chores and early bedtime, but Jeanny didn’t listen. She’d heard it all before.
“Do you understand, young lady?” her mother asked as she leaned down for the jacket and hung it on the rack herself.
Jeanny would’ve liked to tell her mother that no, she did not understand. She didn’t understand why her father hadn’t slept at home in a month, why her mother had claimed, on the phone with someone, that he was probably staying with his “lady friend,” or why the coat rack in the entryway was missing an arm. But she understood one thing: it was all her mother’s fault.
“I wish you were dead,” Jeanny said instead. “Then I could live with dad.”
She reached for the jacket, tried to rip it back off the rack, but the collar caught on the dog leash, and the trunk tipped. For a moment, it hovered in midair—then hit the floor with a violent thud. The wind chimes jingled before shattering into a million pieces. A deep, jagged crack split the rack’s base.
A few days later, Jeanny, waiting to be picked up from school, searched for her mother’s Chevrolet Caprice in the carpool lane. Instead, she spotted her dad’s Ford, awkward and out of place. As the car got closer, she could tell his eyes were bloodshot. Probably from his allergies. Spring was in full bloom.
His eyes were not red from allergies, and neither were Jeanny’s by the time they got home and stepped into the quiet house. In the entryway, Jeanny stared at the coat rack that looked more like a person than a piece of furniture. It still held her mother’s winter coat, as if it were its new owner, now that the rightful one was gone. “I understand,” Jeanny whispered, and hung her jacket on the rack.
* * *
Banjo’s smell and sight were at war with each other. What he saw unsettled him. Or, rather, what he didn’t see.
His routine hadn’t changed: wake up, bark hello, get breakfast (canned food with kibble), wait by the tree, get leashed, go for a walk, get head pats, sleep for a while, wake up, wait by the tree, get leashed again, go for another walk, more head pats, more sleep, wake up, get dinner (only kibble), wait by the tree, get leashed one more time, go for one more walk, get a few more pats, sleep again, wake up—and so on and so forth in a never-ending cycle.
But something was different. She was gone. Had been gone for a long while. He knew because it wasn’t her doing all those things anymore: feeding him, walking him, giving him the good rubs. It was him now. Or, occasionally, the young one.
But his nose said otherwise. His nose said she was still there. All over the house, but mostly in the coats, cardigans, and scarves on the tree in the entryway.
His nose was wrong, Banjo decided, and one fine morning interrupted his routine by correcting the smell with a simple lift of his leg.
They scrubbed the trunk for hours, the man and the young one, with something sharp and stinging in his snout. As punishment, they made him sleep outside. Banjo hated sleeping outside. But it was a fair deal, because when they let him back in, his sight and smell were finally in sync again.
* * *
After months of humdrum, one-way conversations that made Edward think he might die of boredom, he became convinced the coat rack wanted to say something back. So he got the knife from the kitchen—the good one, the one that sliced through meat like jelly—and gave the rack some lips.
Edward pondered what the lips should look like, whose they should be. The rack was many people: mostly his first wife, sometimes his second, occasionally his daughter, rarely his father, mother, grandfather, brother, lover, high school crush. Its magic lay in its capacity to become whoever Edward needed to speak to. He told his first wife sorry for making her kick him out, so that when the stroke hit, he wasn’t home. He told his daughter sorry for choosing excitement over family, time after time. He told his grandfather sorry for taking his wedding gift for granted—only now, an old man himself, did he understand: he had just wanted to leave something good behind.
Because the shape of their lips varied as much as the nature of Edward’s regrets, he decided to keep them simple. A single line would do, so he etched a shallow horizontal slit into the trunk, just above the missing branch. He made the line curve, because he wanted the lips to be happy, to smile.
The rack never spoke back. Edward added color to the lips, a soft pink. Nothing changed. He shaped the edges, just a little, rounded them out, softened the corners. Still no response. He carved a gentle indent through the middle, the hint of a slight part. The lips held their silence.
When his daughter visited him for spring break, she announced she’d finally figured out what to major in. Sociology. She said she knew he would’ve liked her to go into real estate, as he had, but it was not her passion.
Edward said, “I already told you I was wrong to push you into my line of work.”
His daughter said, “You never told me that.”
Shortly after, she brought up the rack. She sounded concerned. A doctor showed up, uninvited, and muttered something about early onset dementia. His daughter announced he’d need to move into a place with more support. A week later, a minivan came to pick Edward up
Reaching for his coat one final time, he told the rack he was sorry to leave, but that he would be back someday. He still didn’t get a response, but Edward swore that at hearing his promise, the rack smiled.
* * *
Tori would never have guessed that the object propelling her into a life of fame and fortune would be a coat rack—especially not a creepy one with pink lips, a ripped-off arm, and a leg split right down its middle. Lucky for her, Tori’s followers couldn’t smell the strong chemical odor through the six-by-three-inch screens of their iPhones, Samsungs, and Pixels. Although, Tori thought, that would be one sweet feature.
It had started with an innocent dance tutorial she had recorded, under which someone had commented, What in the haunted Ikea is that thing in the back?—kicking off a lively discussion that generated a total of 10,697 likes, 312 replies, and a conspiratorial breakdown video narrated by a self-proclaimed woodworker. Tori herself knew little about the coat rack in the entryway of their home, except that it had always stood there, some sort of family heirloom. As far as she could tell, they just sort of ended up with it when they moved into her grandfather’s place, after he’d been placed in memory care. She could’ve asked her mom about it—apparently, the thing had already been around when she was Tori’s age—but Tori didn’t care that much.
In spite of, or maybe because of, her lack of actual knowledge about the rack, Tori got creative. She called it Dr. Hangerstein, tagged him in videos as if he were her co-host, and began selling It’s alive! merch. Pleased with herself, Tori pinned a sticky note to its chest that read This is not a coat rack, in reference to René Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The note, sickly yellow, sat just beneath Dr. Hangerstein’s lips like a bow tie.
For a few weeks, everything went well, until Tori edited a skit in which Dr. Hangerstein came to life. The visual masterpiece took her the entire weekend: she layered in flashing lightning effects, spliced in a fog overlay, inserted a heartbeat sound, color-graded the video in a haunted hospital glow, animated the lips frame by frame, and added a voice filter whispering It’s alive…
Some accused her of faking a haunting to go viral. Others begged her to take it down because the moving lips were “disturbing to say the least.” One user claimed their phone screen had cracked while watching. Another said they’d seen the rack in their nightmares. At school, she found a printed-out still from her video taped to her locker. Under the image of Dr. Hangerstein were the words, It’s not alive. It’s EMBARRASSING.
Embarrassed, Tori took down all the videos of Dr. Hangerstein. She never posted anything again.
* * *
Jonathan had difficulty believing he was about to drive four hours across Georgia for a $22 sale. Gas alone would cost more than that, but the buyer had lowballed him, offering $20 instead of the original $30, and they’d somehow landed on $22 as the final price. Jonathan would’ve liked to turn the “offer” down, maybe send the tongue-out emoji just to be petty, but his wife had insisted they take it. No one else had shown any interest.
“You sure about this?” Jonathan asked as they stood by his pickup, the coat rack strapped to the roof like a hostage.
“I’m sure,” she said, eyes fixed on the crack in the base. “We can’t take it with us, and I need to know it found a home.”
A home with an owner who keeps referring to it as his new art project, Jonathan thought, but kept it to himself. He couldn’t risk his wife changing her mind. Secretly, he was glad she didn’t want to bring the rack to California. Dr. Hangerstein, as his daughter had called it in her TikToks. His wife had been angry with her, but he’d understood. The rack crept him out, too.
It looked even creepier now, naked, stripped off the unnecessary clothes and clutter. Only a sad stump remained, beaten and tired, one crooked arm jutting out toward the sky as if reaching for help.
Jonathan checked the straps while his wife headed back inside. He tugged each one, tested the tension, checked the knots and buckles, gave the whole thing a hard shake, stepped back, eyed the setup from every angle, and double-tapped the roof like a man sealing a deal. “You’re good to go,” he said, then shook his head, realizing he had just spoken to an inanimate object.
About two hours into the drive, Jonathan hit the speed bump at the end of a bridge a little too hard, launching the car briefly off the ground. He heard a screech, almost like a scream, and caught it in the rearview mirror: the coat rack, airborne for half a second, limbs splayed in all directions, before hitting the asphalt.
Jonathan pulled over immediately and stepped outside to inspect the damage. The rack lay lopsided on the shoulder, several branches splintered off, now strewn across the road, like the aftermath of a hit-and-run.
He considered his options. There was no way he’d be able to lift the rack back onto the roof himself, and even if he flagged someone down to help, one of the straps had torn. He could try tying up the loose ends, but he doubted they would hold. His wife would be upset to learn of the rack’s fate, but then again, she didn’t need to know.
Being essentially a tree, at least he could leave it there, by the side of the road. All things considered, it really could have been much worse.
Lara Waas is a New York–based writer and MFA graduate of Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Metaworker, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. She serves as Assistant Fiction Editor at Narrative. She can be found on Instagram @lara_waas
