28 | Psychopomp Magazine
In the background, instead of wolves, there was silence.
The pencil-maker’s heart leapt, and he knocked harder and harder and harder.
After forty minutes, the wife opened a window.
“Go away,” she said.
“I made something for you,” he said.
Her face was blotchy in the half-light.
“Please let me go,” she said.
“What will happen to you?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
“What will happen to me?” he asked.
Her face twisted then.
“Please,” she said.
He thought about begging. He thought about knocking all night, or coming in through a window (he had forgotten where the spare key was kept). The wife would fall into his arms, forgiven and forgotten. His chest felt tight. He could already feel her warmth there, the shudder of ghostly shoulders weeping against him.
He stepped back from the porch.
In his workshop, the light was harsh and bright. He chose the hardest line of lead, slid it into the slender cylinder. That it fit perfectly brought him no pleasure. He fitted an eraser with hands that seemed very small and far away.
He found a piece of blank paper and stood for a long time. He had never needed so badly in his life to say the right thing.
IX.
The tree was gradually reawakening to the world. It was cold, and she had no arms to wrap around herself. She rustled her few branches.
She felt across the clearing for the oak she’d pretended to talk with so many lonely rings ago and shivered in the wind. She wondered at herself in early days, that fleshy