Whispers In The Ash
by Iris Lockewood
Promotional audio excerpt · Chapter 4: Grain Memory
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The annex smelled like sawdust and rain that hadn't fallen yet. Elena Marchetti stood in the doorway a full minute before Callum noticed her, watching the way the morning light came sideways through the one clean window and landed on the workbench like it had somewhere better to be.

"You're early," Callum said, not turning around. He had a board balanced across two sawhorses, and even from the doorway she could see it was ruined. Half of it, anyway. Black on one end, pale gold on the other, like someone had dipped it in a fire and pulled it out before it finished burning.

"Ruth let me in." Elena stepped inside, careful of the sawdust drifts along the baseboards. "She said you wouldn't mind."

"Ruth's usually right about that."

He ran a thumb along the charred end of the board, and something in his face went still and private, the way people's faces go when they're handling a thing that used to be something else.

"Is that from Cedar Row?" she asked.

"Most of what comes through here now is from Cedar Row." He said it flat, no drama in it, like he was reporting the weather. "People bring me what's left. I figure out what's still good."

"And that." She nodded at the blackened half. "Is that still good?"

"Watch." He picked up a block plane, set the blade against the char, and pushed. A curl of black came away, thin as paper, and underneath it was wood. Just wood. Gray at first, then, with the second pass, a thread of gold grain, wavy and close together like a fingerprint.

"That's still there," she said, surprised into it.

"Fire doesn't go as deep as people think. Not into good wood. It scorches the surface and the surface gives up its story so the inside doesn't have to." He kept planing, slow, even strokes, and the gold widened under his hands. "You just have to be willing to take off the part that's ruined instead of throwing out the whole board."

Elena watched his hands. They were steady in a way she envied, the kind of steady that came from doing something enough times that the body stopped asking permission from the mind.

"People keep telling me they're sorry about the shop," Callum said, still working. "Like I need consoling for a building. I don't. I need lumber and about six more weeks before the insurance people stop calling me for the same three documents."

"That's not the same as not caring."

"No. It's not." He set the plane down and turned the board so the light hit the new grain straight on. "I cared about the shop. I care more about not turning into somebody who needs a sad story to get up in the morning."

She didn't say anything to that. She thought about Marco, about the year she'd spent letting people's sympathy become a kind of weather she lived under, and how tired she'd gotten of being handled.

"You want to try?" Callum held the plane out to her, handle first.

"I'll ruin it."

"It's already ruined. You can only improve it from here." A corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "Feet apart. Elbow locked. Let the tool do the cutting, not your shoulder."

She took the plane. It was heavier than it looked, and the first pass she made skidded and caught nothing but air.

"Lower the angle," he said, stepping close enough that she could feel the warmth off his arm without him touching her. "There. Feel that? Now push through, don't stop halfway."

The second pass took a long, even curl off the wood, and underneath it the grain kept unspooling, gold and steady, like the board had been holding its breath this whole time.

"Oh," Elena said, quiet.

"Yeah." Callum stepped back and let her keep going. "That's the part nobody tells you. The board doesn't forget the fire. It just decides how much of the story it wants to show."