In a city where time moved like honey dripping from a spoon, Marcus crafted life from dead wood with his clumsy hands. His fingers, thick and ungraceful as tree branches, struggled to create the delicate curves his mind envisioned.
“Why do you persist?” asked the wood shavings at his feet, their curled bodies dancing in the workshop’s dim light. “Your hands weren’t made for such fine work.”
Marcus smiled, used to conversing with the remnants of his labor. “Because she dances in my dreams,” he replied, “and I must show her to the world.”
Each night, she would appear - a dancer made of living wood, her movements fluid as water despite her wooden form. Her pirouettes left trails of golden sawdust in the air, her leaps scattered wooden petals across his dreamscape.
“Your hands may be clumsy,” she whispered in his dreams, “but your heart carves with precision I’ve never known.”
During his waking hours, Marcus’s workshop filled with failed attempts - wooden dancers frozen mid-stride, their proportions wrong, their faces asymmetrical. Yet each failure seemed to whisper secrets about the next attempt.
One morning, a peculiar customer entered his shop. Her movements were eerily familiar, though he’d never met her.
“I’ve been watching you through the window,” she said, picking up a discarded figurine. “You’ve been carving me.”
Marcus’s fingers trembled. “Impossible. I’ve only seen you in dreams.”
She laughed, the sound reminiscent of wind through leaves. “Perhaps it’s the dreams that saw me first.”
She began to dance then, her movements matching exactly those of the wooden dancer in his dreams. As she twirled, her skin took on the texture of polished maple, her hair the color of rich mahogany.
“You see,” she said, her wooden lips barely moving, “I was always meant to be both flesh and wood. Your clumsy hands weren’t failing - they were remembering.”
Marcus reached for his tools, understanding at last. His supposedly ungainly fingers moved with newfound purpose, carving with the certainty of destiny rather than the hesitation of doubt.
As the final chunk of wood fell away, the dancer in his dreams and the woman in his shop merged into one being - neither fully wooden nor entirely flesh. She took his rough hands in her smooth ones.
“We are all carved by fate,” she whispered, “some of us just take longer to find our final form.”
They danced then, the clumsy woodcarver and his wooden muse, leaving trails of sawdust that spelled out prophecies on the workshop floor. And if passersby noted how the workshop’s window sometimes showed a man dancing alone, and other times with a wooden figure come to life, they chose to believe both versions of the truth.
For in this city where time moved like honey, reality was just another material waiting to be carved into shape by clumsy, loving hands.