Grain
The first thing he carved was a spoon, which he considered an error. Not because it failed as a spoon — on the contrary, it cupped precisely the right amount of soup, or salt — but because it introduced him to the habit of carving, a habit that took root and grew underground before he knew how to stop it.
The spoon led to a small box, which led to a bookshelf that would fit inside a doorway, which led to a series of increasingly implausible objects: a macrocarpa bird with the mark of the saw still faintly visible on its wings, a kauri book impossible to open, an improbably tall post turned from soft kahikatea, an apricot vase cracked from foot to rim.
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