He stares at the door for a while, hoping. It's his door. He cleans the years of sweat and spit and piss and crushed bugs out of its grain, twists the bolts from its flesh, tears out the locks. He returns the wood to the mill, un-saws it, heaves it back a great distance along plunging mud tracks, asks the elephants to drag it back up the steep hillsides. And then, among the profusion of thick grasses and liana and the calls of wild monkeys and birds, he sets the wood upright and it becomes a tree again, one of the trees in the last great golden teak forests on earth, the jungles of northern Burma.


p.22
The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connelly