Woodman Casting Anisiya -

“More pressure,” Pavel ordered. “It’s fighting me.”

He fell without a sound. Like wood.

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.”

Anisiya knelt. Her hands, chapped and strong, pressed the ash steady against the block. Pavel wrapped a strip of rawhide around the wood’s belly, then began to heat it over the coals. The fibres softened, sighed. He bent the curve with a slow, terrible pressure. Woodman Casting Anisiya

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.

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.

Her husband, Pavel, was a man of notches and axe strokes. He could fell a century-old larch so it landed exactly where he wished, splitting open like a gift. But when Anisiya tried to speak of the ache behind her ribs, he would grunt and sharpen his blade. “Wood doesn’t complain,” he would say. “Wood stands still.” “More pressure,” Pavel ordered

“Hold this,” he said, not looking at her.

She did not weep. She had no tears left for men who mistook silence for strength.

Pavel snorted. “Wood doesn’t scream.” Anisiya pushed down

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.

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.

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.

Stand straight. Don’t complain. Bear the weight.