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  • The Paris Review

    A Taxonomy of Wind

    by Ben Shattuck Jun 04, 2018 8 minutes

    Jean-François Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871.

    Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me.

    “Everything all right in here?” one said, stepping into the room.

    I held out my palm to block the light.

    “Police,” he said. “There was an alarm going off.”

    I knew there wasn’t an alarm going off because it had been deactivated months earlier. I thought, This is not the police. This is a home invasion. When I turned on the bedside lamp and saw their uniforms, I thought, Those are fake uniforms.

    He told me to get out of bed. I stood between them in my boxers and T-shirt.

    “Why are there no clothes in here?” the other man said, pointing to the open drawers across the room. “What, you just move in?” They holstered their guns.

    “Yes,” I said. I’d just returned home to Massachusetts after half a year away.

    Rain crackled on the roof and lashed the windows. The day had been warm because of a southerly storm shoving up against the underarm of Cape Cod. Out the window I saw a third man standing on the patio, perhaps guarding the exits.

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