Anisiya knelt. Her hands, chapped and strong, pressed the ash steady against the block. Pavel wrapped a strip of rawhide around the wood’s belly, then began to heat it over the coals. The fibres softened, sighed. He bent the curve with a slow, terrible pressure.
She had become his handle. Every burden he could not swing alone—the winter firewood, the slaughtered goat, the silent meals—she absorbed. And like the ash, she had learned not to scream.
Now, kneeling in the soot-stained snow, Anisiya made a decision softer than a breath. She did not pull her hands away. She did not cry out. She simply stopped resisting —not the wood, but the shape Pavel was forcing upon it.
The ash, feeling her sudden yielding, sprang back with a violence neither of them expected. The rawhide snapped. The hot curve reversed, lashing upward like a sprung trap. The axe head, still tied to the unfinished handle, flew free and struck Pavel across the temple. Woodman Casting Anisiya
“More pressure,” Pavel ordered. “It’s fighting me.”
Behind her, the ash billet began to warm in the spring sun. And for the first time in twelve years, the taiga held its breath.
Pavel snorted. “Wood doesn’t scream.” Anisiya knelt
Instead, she picked up the axe head. She placed it at the edge of the clearing, propped against a birch. Then she walked into the forest—not the way Pavel had taught her, by notch marks and northern moss, but the way the wind went: without permission, without apology.
Anisiya pushed down. The wood groaned. In that groan, she heard her own voice from the night before—when she had said, “I dreamed of the city again. Of bread that isn’t black. Of a door that doesn’t face north.”
He fell without a sound. Like wood.
Her husband, Pavel, was a man of notches and axe strokes. He could fell a century-old larch so it landed exactly where he wished, splitting open like a gift. But when Anisiya tried to speak of the ache behind her ribs, he would grunt and sharpen his blade. “Wood doesn’t complain,” he would say. “Wood stands still.”
But Anisiya heard it. She always had. The first winter of their marriage, she had listened to a green oak stump weeping resin. Pavel called it sap. She called it memory.
As he worked the curve, she watched his hands—not the hands that had once brushed her hair back from her forehead, but the hands that now knew only the language of leverage and grain. He was casting the wood into a new shape, yes. But she realized, with a cold trickle down her spine, that he had been casting her the same way for over a decade. The fibres softened, sighed
But ash, she thought, remembers its roots.