Remsl

He was sitting on the steps of the dried-up fountain, not carving wood, but carving air. His hands moved with the precise, terrible economy of a man who has done one thing for ten thousand days. A long, thin splinter of nothing took shape between his fingers.

Then the carving faded. The water stopped. The laugh echoed once and died. He was sitting on the steps of the

The town of Hailsham-Under-Wood knew him as the woodcarver’s ghost. Children whispered that if you pressed your ear to the bark of the old sentinel oak at the crossroads, you could hear the shush-shush-shush of his knife, paring away the world one curl at a time. Then the carving faded

“Don’t cry,” Remsl said, not unkindly. “That’s just the shape of it settling into you. It’s meant to fit.” The town of Hailsham-Under-Wood knew him as the

I watched him for an hour. He did not stop. His fingers traced the invisible grain of an invisible log, and as they did, I felt something loosen in my chest. A memory I’d locked away—the smell of my mother’s apron, beeswax and flour—drifted past me like a petal. Then another. The sound of my father’s boots on the gravel path. The exact weight of a robin’s egg I’d found when I was seven.