Issue 11 Contributor Spotlight: Fiction by Sean Taro Nishi

Chairmasters

My sister Nebraska had moved back home after her divorce. Nebraska was thirty-five and used to work in hospital administration. Then, after her doctor husband cheated on her with a younger nurse, she decided to pursue an easier way of making money: Webcam modeling. Dad drove her around some thrift stores looking for six-inch heels, which he was happy to pay for. In his mind, Nebraska was still his little starlet, and he figured she would be famous someday. “Look at this bikini,” he said. “It’s shaped like a slingshot.”

Dad never did any of those things for me. The nicest thing he did was not kick me out after college, but that was just so he had somebody to turn the TV off when he got too drunk. We hardly ever talked, and when we did, he’d ask again why I spent eight years getting a philosophy degree that has so far generated a net negative profit.

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel,” I said, quoting Socrates.

“Put some kindling under your ass and light it because you’re going nowhere,” he said.

Outside the house things weren’t much better. I realized I had no friends when I sent out bowling invitations for my birthday and nobody came. I bowled by myself for an hour while eating stale nachos. Meanwhile, the lane next to me was reserved for some kid’s eleventh birthday party. There must’ve been thirty of his classmates there, all wearing Sonic the Hedgehog hats and sunglasses. It takes a big man to admit being jealous of a boy fifteen years younger than him, but he seemed very popular, and I never had a blue cake with spikes on it. I sat at the bar drinking frozen Mai Tais until the boy’s father, Mr. Trench, approached me. He was small, stout and bald like Danny DeVito in Matilda. He assumed I was a professional bowler because I was the only adult there without a child. We sat and talked for hours. He said his wife was leaving him because he unknowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease after a tryst with a Reno prostitute on a recent work trip. “It’s just chlamydia,” he said. “That goes away on its own.”

Before we left, Mr. Trench gave me a goody bag containing a plastic squirt gun, some Kit Kats, arcade game tokens, and a card for his at-home carpentry business: CHAIRMASTERS. “Call me if you need a job,” he said. “Or if you have a coke plug.”

I didn’t know any drug dealers, but I wanted to feel useful for once. Most nights I either watched The X-Files reruns or played Chainmail Dragons online with my clan. I stopped playing when it turned out that a clanmate named Crypt_lurker69 was actually a convicted sex offender who was trying to solicit nude photos from me. He seemed to think I was fifteen and deleted his account when he found out my real age. I threw my laptop in the trash. I decided I needed to go outside more. So the next morning I called Mr Trench, and he hired me immediately as his new apprentice.

***

I should note that I knew nothing about sawing wood, hammering nails, sanding down edges, or even the right way to put on a tool belt. I watched Home Improvement and King of the Hill with my dad growing up (he actually looked a lot like Hank Hill), but only because I thought it would bring us closer. It did not. As my father was a bit of a craftsman himself, you might think I would pick up a thing or two. Wrong. The only thing he ever had me do was take apart our old grill when it started leaking gas. For an entire afternoon I tried dismantling it with a wrench, but the screws had all corroded, making it impossible. I decided to go at it with a sledgehammer instead until the grill collapsed into itself like a Hoberman plastic sphere. I thought my father would admire my savage, direct approach, for what do the philosophers say except the shortest path between two points is a straight line? Instead, he called me a neanderthal and never let me around his tools ever again. I admitted this to Mr. Trench when I showed up at his workshop in Van Nuys. He said my inexperience was fine, as I would train under his other employee, Spivey.

Spivey! We had actually gone to high school together. He was thirty, freckled, nearsighted, and had burn scars all over his hands. He had been held back five times, which he attributed to a combination of ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and a tendency to light small things on fire. Finally, he was transferred to a special-ed class that allowed him to graduate if he could complete a word search puzzle from an aquarium book.

“Fucking bluewhale was the hardest one to find,” said Spivey.

Learning woodworking with Spivey was like trying to pick up a feral cat. If I stood too close to him, he would snarl at me and pull out a jury-rigged Zippo which could shoot a flame three feet. On our first day, he was supposed to show me how to stain a chair. I ended up with a stray nail in my right eyebrow. Whenever I suggested we wear gloves or other protective clothing, he would hack a glob of phlegm in my direction and say, “for fuck’s sake, you think Jesus wore safety goggles?”

There must’ve been a lot of eye injuries in biblical times.

***

At 7 AM, I would wake up and take three buses to the workshop. Our workday started at nine, but Mr. Trench was never there, and Spivey showed up closer to noon. While waiting, I practised my sanding skills on leftover scraps of wood. To work with one’s hands! I began to see myself differently. I’d gone to college for eight years watching movies I didn’t understand with peers who seemed to resent being born white. I’d never dreamed of being a tradesman. Now here I was with splinters in my fingertips and sawdust in my eyes.

Spivey usually showed up slightly drunk and tried to sell me things he heard on podcast, like “Slug Salts” which supposedly cure everything from eczema to erectile dysfunction (I tried them once. It gave me a migraine and later a panic attack). If you’ve ever heard the phrase “measure twice, cut once,” Spivey’s was closer to “measure never, cut never, smoke cigarettes and talk for several hours.” The hot topic of the day was a feud with his neighbor Mr. Park. Spivey’s dog Rotor broke into his house and ate the ashes of his late wife. It’s not the kind of thing you can euthanize a dog for, but Spivey was paranoid that Mr. Park is trying to poison Rotor.

“See these? That fucker left these outside our house for Rotor to eat,” said Spivey.

I looked down at a pile of pinecones in a tote bag.

“I think those fell out of the trees,” I said.

“What’s that white powdery stuff on them?” said Spivey.

“Dried sap probably,” I said.

“That’s arsenic,” he said. “Fuck it. I’m bringing him to work.”

Rotor was an eighty-pound nightmare. She was built like an atomic bomb and couldn’t walk without smashing into something. She barked at me if I breathed and tried to eat my phone if it wasn’t in my pocket. Spivey found her wandering around the side of the LA River six years ago. Supposedly she had a dead chihuahua in his mouth and liked Spivey’s scent (which was a combination of mustard and acetone). The two were attached like conjoined twins. Spivey even called off an engagement to his ex-fiancé because she wanted to give Rotor away after she ate her wedding dress.

“If Rotor were human, I wouldn’t need anyone else. I’d make an honest woman of her,” he said.

***

I’d been coming home a lot to Nebraska filming her OnlyFans videos in the living room. She was supposed to put a red bandana on the front door handle as a reminder to go through the back, but she would forget, and I’d walk in on her naked and aggressively rubbing herself on giant stuffed carnival toys. Plushophillia, they call it.

When we were kids, Mom would have us spend our summer vacations digging for buried treasure in the backyard. Usually it was either a Happy Meal toy or batteries. I always looked for Mom Cards, which could be redeemed for forty-five minutes of uninterrupted Mom time (if she wasn’t asleep). At ten years old, I’d hoarded enough cards to earn a day trip to Castle Park with just her and me, but then she moved to Phoenix with her online lover, which rendered the cards unredeemable.

To his credit, Dad never made Nebraska and I fight for his affection. He made us fight for other things, like the portable fan when it got too hot in the house. Money was tight because of his porn addiction. He would send all his money to women overseas who he thought were young Scandinavian models, except they were actually the same pasty fat guy who lived in Pittsburgh. Mom made more money lecturing teens on UTI prevention then Dad did fixing soda guns at sports bars. Once I went on his laptop to finish my college applications when I happened across a file entirely of people doing creative things with poop. I wasn’t expecting to find that from someone as vanilla as my dad. His favorite beer was Rolling Rock, and his pop culture knowledge was limited to Foreigner and Frasier.

I remember the day in sixth grade when mom told me and Nebraska that she was moving out. She showed us a picture of an indigenous Maricopan nurse from Arizona named Nayá who she’d been talking to on Facebook for the past year. After meeting in-person at an STD conference in Phoenix, the two decided to get hitched and move to their desert yurt.

“You can come with me,” she told us. “But I’m worried your father might off himself if one of you doesn’t stay to watch him.”

Dad initially didn’t seem that bothered about being cuckolded. He said the fact that mom left him for another woman was less hurtful than if it was a man, which seems misogynistic. Seeing him try to date the years after was depressing. He’d talk to these twenty-two-year-olds online who were expecting a sugar daddy, and then being sorely disappointed when they found out he drove a 2001 Jeep Cherokee and couldn’t afford cable. He got so desperate that he started going to Sunday mass, expecting a 6/10 widow might find his All-American blandness appealing. They did not. Then he started following these mansphere YouTube videos with titles like “Why Female Orgasms Don’t Matter.” That just made him even sadder, so he ended up embracing celibacy by drinking copious amounts of whiskey and building birdhouses.

***

One day it was 3PM at the shop and Spivey wasn’t there and wouldn’t answer his phone. We were supposed to be building chairs for a new vegan restaurant, but without him I just ended up whittling checkers pieces (which I had gotten pretty good at). Then at around six Spivey called me from the emergency vet after finding Rotor hiding under his Dodge Charger with bloodied claw marks all over her face.

“He attacked her,” he said.

“Who?” I said.

“Mr. Park,” he said. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“Who the fuck else would it be? A raccoon? A coyote?” he said.

“Those would both be a lot more likely,” I said.

“Then he probably trained them,” he said. “Crafty little fucker.”

I started to worry about Spivey’s mental health. He admitted to me before that he’d been 5150d seven times (which is where they hold you in a hospital because they think you’re a threat to yourself or others). Back in school, Spivey would get in a fight over just about anything. Once he tried to stab our statistics teacher, Mr. Gomez, with a mechanical pencil because he told Spivey not to roll cigarettes in class. Mr. Gomez was a Gulf War vet and knocked Spivey on his ass before he could hurt anyone. While barely five-foot-five, Spivey had a girth that one could describe as “porcupine-like.” You never knew when his quills would come out and he’d set the school on fire.

“Fuck it. I’m buying a gun,” he said.

Thankfully, Spivey’s long history of mental illness and felonies prevented him from purchasing one at a store. Yet somehow he showed up one day with a German Luger from the 1940s.

“This old Italian guy at the VFW hall sold me this for fifty bucks,” said Spivey.

“Does it work?” I said.

“I just have to clean it,” he said.

Later that day I went across the street to buy lunch for us at Splinter’s Pizza. While waiting, I heard a gunshot. I ran back to the workshop and found Spivey wringing blood out of his left hand with a dirty rag.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said.

He had been cleaning the gun but didn’t seem to realize it was still loaded. One twitch and his left hand was missing an index finger. I took him to the emergency room where everyone knew him by name, like Cheers.

“Spivey,” said the on-duty nurse. “Please tell me you didn’t hurt anyone else this time.”

Spivey owed twenty thousand dollars to the Van Nuys Episcopalian Hospital, which he had no intention of paying for. Nor did he care about his recent disfigurement. We left the hospital and ate tacos down the street where he told me about his plan to buy decommissioned missile silos in Nevada and renovate them as luxury doomsday shelters for billionaires.

“The best part is they don’t even have to work,” he said. “If a nuclear war happens, what are they going to do? Ask for a refund?”

That night in bed I began to consider my financial future. Nebraska started making enough money from her OnlyFans to sign a lease and rent a Subaru. Mr. Trench promised to pay me $600 a week in cash, but after three months of working for him I’d only gotten $42 in change and singles that I found lying around the shop. The following morning I called Mr. Trench about back pay, and his ex-wife Lucy answered the phone.

“So you’re one of his stooges,” she said. “You know Chairmasters isn’t even a real business, right? It’s a tax write-off. And as of this week, my lawyers say it’s mine.”

Thinking about it, I realized that we’d never finished a single project or delivered anything to a client.

“Where’s Mr. Trench?” I said.

“Thailand,” she said. “He does this sometimes.”

“I need to get paid,” I said.

“Tell you what,” she said. “If you or the other idiot burns the shop down, I’ll give you the insurance money. We’ll call it a 50/50 split. Sounds good?”

I called Spivey to tell him about Lucy’s offer, but he didn’t pick up. I went to his house, and on the way there, multiple police cars and fire trucks passed by me. I started to suspect that we were going to the same place.

***

The police report said that Spivey made a Molotov cocktail out of a plastic bottle filled with acetone and tried burning Mr. Park’s house down. Turns out fire melts through plastic pretty quickly. The firefighters found his charred body lying on the sidewalk. The coroner said that there was a good chance he didn’t feel any pain from the amphetamines running through his veins. Lucky for Mr. Park the fire didn’t spread to his property. We met in-person on the sidewalk and I found him to be very kind and empathetic, not at all how Spivey painted him.

“He was a sick young man,” said Mr. Park. “Violent. Delusional. Outspoken. Reminded me of a boy I grew up with in Seoul.”

“What happened to him?” I said.

“He’s a military general now,” said Mr. Park.

When Mrs. Trench heard about what happened to Spivey, she called and said I could keep the shop. Knowing nothing about how to run a business, I just sat there seven days a week carving little goblins and golems. Then, when I amassed over a hundred of them, I started taking them home to line my shelf. Dad eventually noticed, and instead of calling me a freak, he said they weren’t half-bad.

“Of course, you’ll need a real teacher to get better,” he said.

“You’ll help me?” I said.

“If your sister can be a porn star, I don’t see any reason why you can’t be Bob Vila,” he said. “Let’s go to Home Depot.”

So now we run a family carpentry business together. We build chairs and donate them to schools and hospitals. We’ve even filmed a local commercial with Nebraska dancing around on some stools I built. I also took ownership of Rotor, who ate Spivey’s ashes when I left the urn out on the counter. Seems fitting. I also changed the name of the shop to Spivey’s, which isn’t exactly helping business, but it’s the least I can do for a friend.

About the Author

Sean Taro Nishi is a Japanese-American writer from Los Angeles. His first short-story collection, ‘Get Motivated!’, was published by Sunflower Station Press in 2025. He lives in Brooklyn where he teaches and plays bass.