Wooden Flesh

The mangled wooden hand crawled across my counter by itself... slowly, scraping its fish-bone nails, as if searching for a throat. The guest sat opposite, hiding his empty sleeve under the table. He spoke so quietly, as if something hungry were sleeping inside the walls that was better left unwoken. The beer in front of him had gone flat. He never touched the mug. The hand crawled all the way to my wrist. It tapped a finger three times on the living vein and withdrew.

Now it lay between us, fingers up. Dried dirt blackened in its hollows. It smelled of a damp coffin opened after many winters. The guest tucked the stump of his arm deeper into his sleeve. - It's not part of the puppet, - he whispered. - It was mine once. I moved my mug further away. He had once served as a carver at a lord's manor above a river where the water looked black even in summer. He made saints, tombstone figures, theatre masks and marionettes.

He knew the names of the bones in Latin, knew how to hide a hinge under waxen skin and how to carve a smile that made people look away. He considered the body a mechanism. And the soul - the creak of poorly fitted parts. One evening the keeper of the keys led him to an empty storeroom beside the lord's theatre. The lord had commissioned a figure in which every guest was to recognize himself, yet not dare say so aloud.

For the work they brought wax, horsehair, silver threads and timber. Only later did the carver notice, on one of the boards, a dark hollow with hair pressed into it, as if from the back of a human head. The wood had been taken from a dismantled coffin. The storeroom stood over an old cellar. Up from it drifted rotting apples, wet stone, and the sweet smell that hangs about a body a few days before the funeral.

The window looked out on an orchard where the trees did not stir even in the wind. Crows sat on the branches for hours without blinking. Every night the carver heard a soft scratching under the floor. As if someone below were working with a knife too. He hewed out the torso, hollowed the chest and set the head on a hidden wooden spike. He covered the face with wax mixed with ash and chalk. The puppet was coming out flawless. That was frightening.

A living face is always a little crooked: one eyebrow higher, a lip that twitches, fingers of different lengths. Here everything was correct to the point of disgust. As if a person had finally been cured of life. On the third night he woke because the storeroom had gone unnaturally quiet. The floor had fallen silent. The beams. The door. Even the fire in the stove burned without a crackle. The puppet was no longer by the wall.

It sat at the table, its hands laid out before it. The wax eyelids were shut, the head tilted slightly, as if it were listening to his breathing. Under its bare feet the floor sagged like stretched canvas. The carver stepped toward the door, but the door slid further away. The stove drew closer to the table. The walls slowly closed in.

The beam came down so low it touched his hair. The room was folding itself around the puppet like a stage set that someone invisible was assembling for the next scene. The carver clapped a hand over his mouth. His breath was coming out of the puppet's chest. He touched its shoulder. Under the wax something stirred and answered with a touch from within. In the carver's chest something clicked softly; a cog of the mechanism skipped inside him.

The candle bent toward the table, and the shadow of the bowl crawled out to meet it. The puppet opened its mouth. In the darkness between its lips there was no tongue; a small copy of the night sky trembled there. The words rose up under his skin, scratched out from the inner side of his ribs: "You did not create me. You are the maker of the form; I am the maker of the content." The puppet's mouth kept widening, though the wax did not tear.

"Your world has long been hanging on strings. People call them veins, trees call them roots, the heavens call them stars. Different names help you not to notice the one rope. Very ironic..." Then something above the ceiling jerked its head upward. The carver rushed to the window. The village had gone flat, as if painted on canvas. The smoke from the chimneys stood frozen in identical streaks.

People walked along the road without a sound, and their footprints appeared ahead of their feet. A dog by the fence opened its jaws. The bark rang out only after the animal had already closed them. Above the church the sky sagged in a fold. In the crack behind it something pale and huge was stirring. He grabbed a knife and slit open his palm, wanting to see blood - the last proof that he was alive. The skin parted dryly. Beneath it lay tightly stretched white fibres.

Between them showed a pale wooden ring. He pried at one fibre with the knife. In the yard a dog began to howl. In the cellar a child screamed. The puppet raised its head. And his own hand began to clench without his will. For years he walked the roads while his flesh slowly hardened and took on the smell of fresh wood shavings. The hand was the first to fall off. At dawn the guest left the inn, leaving it on the counter. I threw it into the stove. It would not burn.

The fingers only clenched, and the index finger slowly rose toward the ceiling. There, between the beams, a thin white thread was pulling taut. It went through the roof straight up into the sky. And someone up above gave it a careful tug.