Jack's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Jack was halfway through the second scrollwork on the bench leg when the sky cracked open. Rain came down in ropes, not drops. Within a minute the clearing turned to soup, and her chalk sketches curled black at the edges. She grabbed the oilcloth off the stone and threw it over her sketchbook first, tools second. The bench itself she couldn't move. It was three hundred pounds of quarry stone, half-carved, and it was going to be the one she sat on with the Valkyrie when the work was finally done. She had been carving benches in this stretch of pine woods for two summers. Every one so far had been wrong. Too smooth. Too stiff. Not the bench a woman like that would sit on. Jack believed, the way some people believed in prayer, that if she cut the right one, the red-haired woman with the three foxes would come out of the trees and take the empty half. She had seen her twice on the road. She had not spoken to her either time. A bench was easier than a sentence. Jack shoved the sketchbook under her shirt and hauled the tool roll onto her shoulder. The chisels alone were worth more than a month of food. She scanned the clearing. The nearest overhang was the split rock at the north edge, maybe forty paces through mud. She ran. Her boot went out from under her once and she came down hard on one knee, but she kept the tools dry. Under the rock she crouched, breathing, watching water sheet off the ledge in a curtain. The sketchbook was smeared but readable. The chisels were dry. The bench sat alone in the downpour, taking the rain like it had been waiting for it. When the storm thinned an hour later, Jack walked back. The half-carved leg had a long pale streak down one side where runoff had cut a channel through her chalk lines and washed grit into the fresh grooves. She ran a thumb over it. The stone was softer there than she had thought. The rain had found a seam she'd missed. Her plan for the second leg was ruined; she'd have to recut the whole panel to match the new flaw, or start the bench over. She wiped her hands on her wet trousers and sat down in the mud beside it. Somewhere past the tree line, a fox barked once, sharp and close. Jack lifted her head.