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 had rolled over. “You dream too much.”
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.
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. Woodman Casting Anisiya
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.”
“More pressure,” Pavel ordered. “It’s fighting me.”
Because something in that clearing had finally learned to scream. Behind her, the ash billet began to warm in the spring sun
The morning light bled through the pine branches like a weak infusion of tea. Anisiya knew the taste of that light—the taste of another day swallowed by the taiga. She had been the woodman’s wife for twelve years, and for twelve years, she had watched him read the forest better than he had ever read her face.
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.
Pavel snorted. “Wood doesn’t scream.” “You dream too much
She did not weep. She had no tears left for men who mistook silence for strength.
Today, Pavel was casting a new axe handle. It was a ritual he performed each spring, squatting in the clearing behind their cabin, a fire hissing at his feet. He had selected a billet of white ash—straight-grained, resilient. The wood lay across his knees like a patient animal.
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.