‘Taken at face value, ‘Just Table Legs’ goes about its business honestly. The business sells no tables but only their legs, with discounts on matching sets of four or six (but reasonable prices for odd numbers between). They offer custom work for the existing table that needs a leg replaced. The shop reeks of warm sawdust. The owner’s hands are smooth and calloused.

Every chair leg is sold with nails pre-installed, sharp and silver and difficult to transport.

People are found with these nails inside them all the time, the legs swung with such ferocious intent that those pictures of crime scenes that have been made public show the wooden limbs still projecting from the flesh and bone of the victim in whom they have become embedded. 

The owner does not comment on the tendency for his work to be used in murder- only gestures to the sign at the front. 

‘Just Table Legs.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside