Remsl

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

The homes of the people who had loved.

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. “They don’t last,” Remsl said, standing

It was not a name given at birth, nor a title earned in battle. It was a sound, a shape, a void in the shape of a man. Remsl .

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. He was sitting on the steps of the

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

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. It was not a name given at birth,

I never finished my catalogue. Instead, I went home and dug out an old whittling knife from my grandfather’s toolbox. I am not good at it. My carvings are clumsy, lopsided things that look like nothing at all.