Remsl

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.”

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

“I’m the archivist,” I said, clutching my notebook like a shield. Remsl smiled

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.

“Homes,” he said. “I carve the homes people have forgotten they lived in. Not the walls. The space inside the walls. The warm pocket of air where a child hid during hide-and-seek. The bit of hallway where two people fell in love on a rainy Tuesday. The silence in the pantry after a good meal.” You try to trap what’s gone

Then the carving faded. The water stopped. The laugh echoed once and died.

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. That’s why you have to make so many

“You’re the scribbler,” he said. His voice was the sound of dry bark flaking off a log.