[story] Texture of Time

short fiction written at Columbia Summer Camp 2023

Before you moved to the city, your dad was a logging worker.

He was a logging worker fourteen years before you were born and never changed his career since. His obsession with wood was known to the whole village. Your neighbor once told you jokingly: even when your mom was giving labor, your dad wanted to finish chopping the last piece of wood because he was “really feeling it.”

Working with wood was art, your dad never forgot to educate you.

Your dad brought you to the mountain he had been around for some twenty years, so you witnessed his mastery of trees. To fell a white pine tree, two plastic-iron wedges were used, inserted deeply into the trunk so the chainsaw wouldn’t get pinched while running. Axes were swung, firmly and forcefully, so wedges were held in place. Then the chainsaw was activated as the cord was pulled swiftly, producing a noise that didn’t belong to the forest. The groaning was quiet, but the shaking was loud as the half-dead golden leaves fell before the tree did. Then a depressed noise scared the birds away. You saw and smelled the dust rise. Your dad approached the tree while drying his sweat, in a fresh and childish excitement.

This your dad taught you: to make firewood, chop the log into small pieces. Position yourself with legs well apart; relax; raise the ax over your head; extend; bend your knees a little for better impact; swing the ax; don’t hesitate; strike again. You learned this as your dad held your hands with the ax. Then you felt the coarseness of his palms. Calluses were part of him as they were padded evenly throughout his fingers. You realized the cost of his obsession was that he assimilated the texture of his hands to that of wood.

You never loved wood chopping. Your dad smiled and shook your hand as a gesture of understanding. Then he wouldn’t let go, and squeezed your hand as hard as he could until you first laughed in panic and then screamed in pain. His favorite prank.

Some woods were rough and that was why they were cheap, like the pinewood your dad just cut. Some of the most expensive woods, such as walnut wood, were smooth and glossy given the same amount of sanding and smoothing, he told you. Once, he worked with a black walnut wood imported from eastern Canada. Your dad started singing, which was rare. He ran his fingers through the surface of the plank like touching gold. He sniffed the plank in a similar manner – you knew he was in love with its smell of solidity. You saw his fingers leave a mist of barely visible condensations, so you felt its surface too, a calming coldness. Eventually, he carved, cut, and turned the plank into a chair with delicate patterns, which was sold to “Bob’s discount furniture” a few weeks later.

This you learned through experience: the smaller the pieces of the firewood, the better it cooked. In your first experiment, you added chunks of unchopped logs that barely fit in the stove, which immediately extinguished the fire. Your dad came hurriedly, scolding you, and pulled the chunks out of the furnace. Strangely, he smoothed the parts of the woods that had blackened into soot in a way that he would when cleaning the wound of a child. You were confused because pinewood was the least expensive wood. Then he showed you how to chop the wood with love and care. Later you understood that that meant cutting the wood along its grain, which made it easier to split. But your dad, poorly educated, rarely explained it in such terms.

During dinner, the smell of pinewood burning permeated your house. You inserted the roughly chopped timber into the stove. You heard the passage of time in the snappings and cracklings as the fire consumed the wood. At the dinner table, your dad talked about how his hard work eventually paid off as he accumulated some wealth. During sleep, you asked your dad to sit next to your bed to protect you from the ghosts in the mountain. One cold morning, before you could recover from the warmth of bed, he told you that your family was leaving for the city. “Why?” you asked, “can we not?”

Then you moved to the city. Your dad bought a big apartment that was smaller than your house.

Soon you realized why you moved to the city: dad could eventually rest for a little because you didn’t need firewood in an apartment. He had worked for very long, mom said, and he deserved to rest a little. But it was then that your dad started complaining.

Your dad didn’t have dementia, diabetes, or Parkinson’s. But his back had been bugging him for a while and his neck pain was never cured. “Resting isn’t the way,” he’d always say. Then you had an epiphany that was too stupidly obvious: dad hadn’t rested for some thirty years.

Without logging, dad turned his energy elsewhere. He started to care about everything you did, which you did not appreciate. When you traveled, he warned you that the rented apartment was on the fourth floor without an elevator. You refused his suggestion to carry less luggage. He disallowed you to carry the bag on only one shoulder because it would make that side of shoulder unsymmetrically stronger, which made you intend to do it more. He also started reading health articles that were written by fake specialists with the sole intent of selling their products. He wouldn’t stop telling you “oranges have the most Vitamin C in it” even though this was the tenth year he had been telling you “oranges have the most Vitamin C in it” and you knew that that was not true. You turned down most of the help that he offered.

This you found out entirely by yourself: your dad had become lovingly annoying. The third year living in the city, you thought he was turning his sickly obsession with woods towards you. So, you told him politely that he needed to set you free, just like how he set free a tree. He didn’t understand and said, “I love you very much.” You weren’t emotional, but you said nothing but “I know.” He said “sorry” in a hoarse voice. You were shocked because it was the first time you heard him say it.

“I just wanted to do something for you.”

One day, remorsefully, you realized your dad knew nothing other than woods. For example, he had an iPhone X but had not used FaceID. Or, he had trouble reconnecting to the WIFI once disconnected. The other day, you went to an antique furniture shop with your dad. There were primarily chairs, tables, and closets made of fine wood. The shop was hectic. Suddenly, a wave of people walked out of the shop like they walked out of chapel and you lost sight of your dad. Ten minutes later, you found him trying to pull out a thread of material from a costly chair made of walnut wood. “What are you doing?” you asked in a tone of reproach.

“They are disrespecting the wood. They are disrespecting….” You heard in his voice a peculiar passion of youth, before it was overcome by another wave of sounds, asking, not even in English, “Boss, how much this chair for?”

Your dad once bragged that he passed the eyesight assessment for pilots and you just found out a week ago that he was reading the newspaper with lenses thicker than yours. He was unusually mad when you missed his birthday because you were very busy. He challenged you to an arm wrestle. You won and you were happy for a split second.

Afterward, your dad complained that his back pain was worse than before. You checked his back for the first time in a long time and you could see with your naked eye that his spine was slightly distorted. You felt the texture of his back. Much worse than you thought. His skin lost the moisture and elasticity of youth, replaced by tiny skin flakes and wrinkles. You noticed an irregular dark spot to the right of his waist and you took him to the doctor and the doctor said he was fine.

It was not until, that night, in his room, you smelled that distinct odor of your grandmother’s that you realized the name of this very disease was time.

Tonight, as the uncertainty of tomorrow squashes you into your bed, just like trees into the Earth, you realize you can’t fall asleep. Then, you wake your dad from sleep. Shamelessly, you ask him to once again do the old trick. Surprised, dad sits beside where you lay, waits, and caresses your forehead with his forest-weathered fingers, quietly and tenderly, just like how he caressed those fine-polished walnut woods in his glorious past.