Suburban Heights, Ohio A sweeping report from the Institute for Domestic Solitude confirms what families long suspected but never dared interrupt: the contemporary father has realized his deepest aspiration, which is to stand silently among his tools and be accounted for by no one.
It tracked one representative father, noting he entered the garage four times a day, each time announcing he was 'going to check on something.' Investigators could not determine what the something was, and concluded the father could not determine it either. His children believe he is building something. His spouse believes he is fixing something. The father, reached for comment, was holding a single bolt he had held since the previous spring, and described himself as 'right in the middle of it.'
He is not hiding from his family, a distinction the family did not request and he volunteered four times. He loves them ferociously, which is precisely why he must occasionally love them from a structure attached to the house but not technically inside it.
Researchers were careful to note the garage need not contain a project, a car, or even a reason. It must only contain the door, and the door must close. Several subjects, when pressed, could not say what was inside, only that it was theirs.
The report adds the behavior is hereditary. Every father had learned the garage from his own father, a man he loved in the complicated, low-grade way reserved for whoever first teaches you to disappear, and could not, on most days, stand. Each is now passing it down to children who will one day stand in garages of their own, holding a bolt, quietly unable to forgive the man who showed them how.
The institute closed with a single recommendation for the nation's families: let him. He will come back inside. He always comes back inside. He just likes knowing the door is his.
Satyr Satire went to the garage to write this and has not, at the time of publication, come back inside.