Repose

[After his conversation with Gwen. As Cris M.]

[Locked Jason W]
You know who I am?

[The place in the woods, it was hidden. It was placed deep within the copse and the light licked over the walls that were glass and found the walls that were wood and the studio cradled in the heart of the copse, it blended. The air smelled like cold and loam and ash, from the crouched hump of the kiln that hunched silent in brick. Ana moved from the studio to the kiln and back again, slow progress but it had method. The wild curls were loosely twisted back from her neck, and she wore old overalls in denim over a long-sleeved undershirt marked red at the wrists with smeared clay and boots, the kind meant for men who worked in shipyards and on building sites. The kind that could be worn for decades until they were comfortable and survived long past most men's lifetimes.

Ana, her pair was forty years old. They were comfortable as tissue now, as slippers, and she rubbed sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt when her nose prickled with new scent worked into the fresh sharp smell of winter in the woods. She knew the way the woods surrounding Repose layered smell over one another. It was easier here, where the green rose and choked off the road from this place within the trees, where she could parse earth and loam and leaf-fall and ash and clay and dirt and her own sweat from the smell of rain in the air. There was something else, something animal and strange but the shape of this scent was like memory, imperfectly known. Human and it blended with the artificial, with perfume and places that Ana did not know enough of their fingerprints to identify them but the scent in the heart of them? That she knew without knowing why.

It smelled like home. Home was a very long way in the past. Home was not the studio and the kiln or Repose however many years it had been her place to return. Home was within the whitewashed walls of a small house in the outskirts of a town and a scent that had mingled with essence-of-violets, fresh bread and woodsmoke from the fire. It too, was a human smell but the woman who had lived it had been dead for half a century.

Ana looked now sharply toward the crack of the growth underfoot, the snap of brittle twigs and the rustle of trees.]