Free Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem

brother’s wife died, he could not live, and yet he could not die.” He rested his hand against the smooth wood of the door, his thumb caressing the grain one could see but not feel, the grain of a dream. Alejandro did not believe Señor Echevarría could have taken his hand away from the door and walked away then, even if he had wanted to, even if he had been paid. “The village . . .” His brown eyes drifted to the side, to the narrow dirt road. “They all need the work. But they all still wish him better.”
    Alejandro stared up at the man, trying to remember how long he had worked for his father in the woodcarving business, and knew it had been longer than Alejandro had been alive. His mother had told him. His mother had known Señor Echevarría when all who were now old in the village had been young. “But it will happen someday they will not wish him better, they will not wish him well,” Alejandro said.
    Señor Echevarría nodded solemnly. “The old ones will tell you that even a fly may have a temper. And the fish that sleeps is soon carried away by the current.” Then the man closed his eyes and leaned forward and kissed the beautiful wood of the door, the most beautiful thing his father had ever carved (“for it is the door to our hearts”) and then he left. And then Alejandro closed this beautiful door and it was all dark inside once again.
    ----
    Since Alejandro’s mother died his father had carved no wood. Sometimes Alejandro would see him in his bedroom walking around, making strange motions with his hands, twisting his face into strange faces, and other idiotic things which might be substitutes for dreaming, and for carving. Perhaps being a fool eased his pain.
    But it still angered Alejandro that his father had not spoken to him since the day of his mother’s death. And it shamed him that he had not spoken to his father because he did not know what to say.
    “It will be dry again today,” Alejandro said to the wood of the house: the beams, the mantel, the smooth trim, the tightly-knitted flooring. “It has not rained for months. Your beautiful fathers and mothers in the forest must be parched and dying, leaning one against the other with bare, brittle limbs.”
    But the wooden heart of the house did not reply to Alejandro, no matter how sweetly he talked. Perhaps it was aware how the boy had stopped oiling its wooden extremities, because they could not afford the oil. Perhaps it knew that it too would die like its relatives in the forest, die from the outside in, the dryness creeping from roof and timber to door to mantel and trim, drying into the heart where it would flake and disintegrate and disperse its memories of the lives it had sheltered up and down the dusty street.
    Perhaps it was aware of how little the boy knew of the world beyond this dying village. For Alejandro, the son of the greatest woodcarver in the village, had never seen the forest.
    In any case Alejandro decided the house need not worry about the drought, for in the other bedroom his father wept, and the house drank from his sorrow.
    Alejandro spoke to the house and his father spoke to no one. The house drank his father’s tears and held its wooden tongue.
    ----
    Alejandro’s mother had been the most beautiful woman to ever live in that village. There were some women in the village who dressed up more, who spent money on cheap jewelry, but a burro is a burro, even if he wears a silver collar. And all the old women said she had been the best mother as well. Alejandro did not understand how this could be, since she had died and left him—her only child—in this silent wooden house.
    But she had been beautiful, this he had known to be true. And even as a small child he remembered how everyone—men and women both—had talked to her, how their voices had become softer when she was around, how they had pleaded so softly, how they had wanted.
Felicia
, they would call.
Come sit with us! Felicia, come talk with us a