Aaron and open Who: Aaron and anyone What: Voice-testing and whittling When: Recent Warnings: Nada.
Aaron's nose was full of the smell of gasoline. Wasn't no smell that was meant to live in anybody's nose, it was pungent and it was bitter and it had something like sour fish to it. It clung to his hands and hair after. He didn't care none about his clothes, because those could be soaked in the lake and stretched out and dried and after they didn't smell of nothing but sunshine and the dark of the lake. (Dark had a smell, if you're asking. It was a strong and peculiar smell, like earth after the rain except less bright and less clean.) Gasoline sat on his tongue like silver butted up against his teeth but gasoline in Repose was better than clean air somewhere else that was bricked in and walled up by city and by road.
He stayed out the way of the road by the way the cars came in. He didn't know one car from the other until they pulled in and picked a pump, cars were all the same, except some had blue paint and some had red. He looked at the people in them. Watched the truth their faces held when they went looking for gasoline. Aaron could figure a journey from the way some man held his mouth, whether he was going off someplace to buy things to put in the earth or to sell things he'd taken out. Sometime it was the girls from the park Destiny lived. They looked cold and they looked sad in a cracked way under the smiles that were like plastic. They'd stick around long after they were worn out. Come closing, wasn't no point in staying. He checked on the windows and doors, because people minded windows and doors a lot when they lived places which didn't make no sense because doors and windows could unlock same as they could lock.
And then he beat it. Left the high stink of gasoline at his back. Part of the reason gasoline was a problem was because it was thick and it was dead. Couldn't go smelling nothing underneath it and smells were truth the same way faces were truth. Gasoline was like a lie, and Aaron put his back to te station soonest he was done and loped across the town toward the woods.
Baker he liked. Baker he stopped by plenty because baker he remembered made sugar-things that broke sweet on the tongue and curled warm into the bottom of his belly just by thinking about it. But baker wasn't baking so much and nobody, even the baker liked people who stood outside and breathed on the glass til it smoked up a little window of cloud all their own and Aaron gave the bakery a good long look and a good long draw of air. Baker cleared out gasoline some, because yeasty butter was a good, true smell.
Baker needed money. Aaron gave a good long forlorn kind of look at the window and the people and he dug his hands into his pockets. They were good pockets, because they'd been patched over some at the last place. Got attached to clothes, because once they smelled good and you they held onto it under the other smells of places yu didn't want to go smelling of. But he didn't have cash right now, work would come and bring it. That was a truth that Aaron learned quick.
Wood place smelled good too. Sap and quick, not living which was better than dead but fresh-cut wood remembered where it was from and the hardware store had plenty. Fresh-cut wood dead a while was easier to work with and people bought worked-with wood more than they bought the other kind. Living was prettier, but living couldn't go putting in rooms. He dug his knife out of his pocket, folding kind that had a blade sizeable, and he checked it with the flat of his thumb some. Didn't wick his blood from him like sap from cut branch so it needed sharpening, but cash could buy sharp as well as it could buy bakery stuff, and it was still sharp enough to do what he needed right now.
He dug into the pocket of his jeans and brought out careful the piece of cut wood from the morning. Living wood just cut didn't do nothing but sit there. It didn't want to be nothing but living, which made it useless for anything else. Aaron understood this kind of protest better than anyone, but it took patience and a kind of careful to wait out the living-now-dead wood until it had given up on living.
He picked a tree, a big one with a good broad spread of branches and sat close up enough that the bark would rub some off on his shirt and squeeze out some of the gasoline, and he set on whittling. Sit out long enough, the gasoline wouldn't follow him home any.