Remsl [TOP]

“What are you carving?” I whispered.

Remsl smiled. It was a small, inward thing, like a knot in wood. “Same sickness. You try to trap what’s gone. I try to set it free.”

He held up the finished piece. I saw nothing. But I felt a room—a kitchen with a low ceiling, a kettle whistling, the shadow of a cat stretching across a sun-drenched flagstone floor. It was the kitchen of my great-aunt’s cottage, torn down in 1987. “What are you carving

I met Remsl on a Thursday, which was market day, though the market had been dead for thirty years. I was there to catalogue the ruins for the Historical Society—a fool’s errand, as the Society had no money and the ruins had no interest in being catalogued.

“Don’t cry,” Remsl said, not unkindly. “That’s just the shape of it settling into you. It’s meant to fit.” “Same sickness

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.

“I’m the archivist,” I said, clutching my notebook like a shield. I saw nothing

“They don’t last,” Remsl said, standing. “Nothing does. That’s why you have to make so many.”