---

– 4 –

“There’s been a fire over at the Bosque Verde.” Leandro entered the house, removed his coat, and hung it on a hook on the wall. “Dry leaves, it seems.”

Eduardo shuddered, his nails rasping against his cane. He was sitting on an armchair he’d put where the old pendulum clock had struck its last sigh five years before.

“Will it reach us?”

Bosque Verde was a grove at the other side of the Amorims’ property. It couldn’t be seen from there, but the scent of ashes stuck to the air like the remains of a fireplace. Eduardo had woken up that morning with the smell and yelled for Leandro, asking him to find out its source as soon as possible. Leandro obeyed. He was always there for his grandpa, though sometimes the old man seemed not to notice. In the core of old Eduardo’s soul, he probably missed Joana a lot more than she deserved.

“Vô, not even if a hurricane blows the fire toward us.” Leandro patted Eduardo’s thinning hair. “Authorities are already there and it won’t even spread too much. Just relax.”

Eduardo nodded, but his eyes remained open and attentive at the windows. He stayed like that during the remainder of the day, sometimes glancing at the windows, sometimes dozing off, other times mumbling about fires. Leandro left for college. It was only when he came back later and told Eduardo the fires had been dealt with that the old man was able to rest his head on the armchair with relief.

Leandro was no more the teenager tied to a set of earphones that I knew when I came to live in the Amorims’ residence. Now a twenty-five-year-old young chap, his wavy hair fell over his shoulders and his obsession with Metallica had transformed into a frayed Lady Justice on his left bicep, ironically matching his ongoing Law studies.

“Do you still talk with your sister?” Eduardo asked when Leandro served some spaghetti for Eduardo that night, the ashen odor still adhering to the air. It was a recurrent question.

“She never reached back.” Leandro always lied. If Eduardo knew how to read eyes as I did, he would see Leandro’s evasiveness. But Eduardo just moaned in agreement.

Leandro circled the table and sat on me. He was always the one to pick me, and sometimes, even after ten years, he still blurted out compliments about my comfortable upholstered seat or my perfectly built arms and backrest. He never paid too much attention to my aquatic themes though, which were now kind of battered and unimpressive anyway. Eduardo had taught Leandro how to properly take care of me, but Leandro’s hands were never so good as Eduardo’s, never so precise. And the old man wasn’t able to kneel and scrape dirt from an equally shriveling chair. And now there were days darkness stretched and not a single spot of sunlight fell over me. It reminded me of the lonely days at Wood & Depot, just waiting to be bought. In hindsight, I remembered those times with a slight sense of nostalgia, even if deep down I knew my life was a lot more meaningful now. In the end, all I wanted was to stave off the thought that Eduardo Amorim wouldn’t be as longevous as oak. One day he would be a long pack pushed into a white truck.

Eduardo was depressive and alone since Leandro had to spend too much time in college. Sometimes Jeff, Leandro’s boyfriend, came to check on Eduardo, and the old man seized the opportunity to talk about carpentry, how he had developed novel techniques to clean glasses back in the day, and how his enterprise was bound to break, but he saved it and rode it to glory. Jeff listened all along, as patient as Leandro, preparing food for him and sometimes even cleaning me (even clumsier than Leandro). But Jeff wasn’t always available, and in the rare moments when it was only Eduardo and I in the house, the wood creaked its subtle messages. From my unprivileged position in relation to the rest of the Amorims’ house, I couldn’t really know what happened upstairs or in the smelling domains of the kitchen. But wood spoke. It carried crepitations and voices, and sometimes I felt them shrilling up my legs, bringing Eduardo’s weeping from the privacy of his bedroom, sometimes his mumblings about what he was planning to do in the day, how the weather was bad, and how life could be different if not for his actions.

I never really thought about the second chance Joana talked about. I didn’t want to understand her, I just wanted to forget her, as if by doing so Eduardo was also going to abandon her in the corners of his mind like a neglected, unfinished piece of furniture. But that wasn’t the truth. Eduardo’s gaze hollowed from time to time, and other times her name whispered up my legs, carried by the wood. So I knew Eduardo was dwindling in a spiral of thoughts.

One day, Eduardo left for a walk. He did so every now and then with spurs from Leandro, who insisted he needed to stay healthy. That day, Leandro brought Jeff home and they sat across each other at the table, just like Eduardo and Joana ten years before.

“My sister is very secretive,” Leandro said. “She told me something recently on the phone.”

“It’s upsetting you,” Jeff said, grabbing his boyfriend’s hands.

Leandro nodded.

“She said I should stop caring about Eduardo — and she calls him that, never grandpa or grandfather — because he was no good man. When I asked why she wouldn’t tell. I told her if she wasn’t going to tell me, it would be better if she had stayed silent. She hung up.”

“You have any idea what she does mean?”

“Nope. All I know is there’s something in our past, something that has to do with my parents. But they never told me, and I never insisted because I know how it bothers Vô.”

“It bothers you, too. You never tell me about your past.”

“There was a fire. My parents died. I was just a toddler back then, and have no memories of what happened. Vô brought my sister and me here and raised us. That’s all I know, and I’m not sure if I want to know more.”

“And Joana . . .”

“She blames him for something, I just don’t know what.”

One day, though, I came close to knowing why. Of all people, a chair. But then life intervened, like always, and things would never be the same for the Amorims. (Nor for me.)

The stairs creaked with Eduardo’s slippers and cane. He stopped before me, casting a long shadow. The purses under his eyes were blackened and his lips cracked. He’d been crying.

“Not many like you anymore,” he said, sliding a finger over the seahorse’s head on my backrest. At first, I thought he was speaking about seahorses, but he kept a while at this, fingers coming and going in indecisive patterns. Then he stopped and stared at the palm of his hands. “Not many like us.”

My hardwood crackled inside of me while his words sank in. He wasn’t just aware of my consciousness but also had the same hands as Anatólia’s, capable of bestowing a sense of existence upon woodcraft.

“I had one like you,” he told me, turning me around to face him as if the front of my backrest were my face. “A wooden stool made of beech. I didn’t choose to give it life. But it happened, so I had to take care of it as I took care of plants.” He shook his head. “No, not like plants. Not even like dogs. I treated it as if it were my child. It ruined my life, though. Not its intention, no. But it did nevertheless. Well . . .” Tears now crossed his cheeks, through his wrinkles, and onto his white beard. “I suppose I ruined myself. Who am I to blame a stool?”

He guffawed.

“It was —”

Leandro came in with Jeff. Their faces had darkened shades to them, and Jeff kept throwing glances at Leandro. If I could, I’d send them out. I needed to listen to the rest of the story.

“Are you okay, Vô?” Leandro said, putting a hand over his grandpa’s shoulder. “You are crying.”

Eduardo smiled. “Just babbling romantic rhymes and poetries that came to mind. I got all cheesy.”

Leandro and Jeff exchanged not-so-relieved looks.

“I have something to say.” Leandro pulled out one of my apple-themed friends and sat on it, rubbing his hands and pinching his lips.

“You are going to get married,” Eduardo said, propping his elbow on me. That was the news I’d like to hear, something that would make the old man forget his broken family at least for a while. But Eduardo was trembling. Both of us could read Leandro’s eyes very well. We’d learned many things through the years. Leandro had something else to say, something we weren’t going to like.

Leandro shook his head and stared at Jeff one last time. Jeff nodded, even if hesitantly.

“Joana went back to Portugal,” Leandro said. “She’s going to live there for good.”

Eduardo sat on me.

---

– 5 –

The sunlight I loved so much when I was varnished and good-smelling wasn’t so friendly in the long run. Twenty years after I yearned so much for those light streaks cutting through the lumberyard’s boards, my wood darkened, dried out, and rifted at the edges. The luster varnish I thought would endure until the end of time had dulled to a stained, rough finish. But the sun wasn’t the only one to blame. My seahorses had heads a little more flattened now, and the furrows in their lines had accumulated grime and dust. The water lilies on two of my feet were unrecognizable, just bulks of wood, the result of years bumping into the table and the other chairs. My seat had faded from crimson to a whitish violet, but it was mostly intact but for a small cut on its side. I imagined myself looking a lot more like Anatólia in her last days.

And speaking of my carpenter, I had her sentence figured out.

Leandro and Jeff decided to hire an apartment nearby, so they could spend more time with Eduardo and keep encouraging him to maintain a healthy routine. Rare were the moments of laughter and joy in the Amorims’ residence, but there was still something flowing there. And whatever it was, I decided to call it love. I might be completely wrong, being a chair and all, but that was what answered the doubts I had about Anatólia’s sentence. Who was she, the one who would love me? It didn’t matter as long as I was there with them, static, partially hidden by the table. And love — or whatever you might call it — surged from Leandro to Jeff, from Jeff to his grandfather-in-law, and from Eduardo to me. The old man and I shared a special bond by now, an old bone-made creature and a piece of battered oak-built furniture.

Sometimes, Eduardo threw glances only I understood, sometimes he smiled, other times he whispered, and when he was alone he told me about that time when Leandro and Joana’s parents were alive and they decided to plant trees in the backyard. Or that other time when Joana tried to count the fish swimming in shoals in a creek not a mile away from the house. He was the head of a broken family, a man whose shoulders were bulky with guilt. But he knew how to love and to be loved.

I never learned the full story about the stool from Eduardo himself. After discovering Joana was leaving, he drowned in a personal sulkiness of guilt that lasted for some time. His habits changed, his voice went from the tight, educated tone filled with analysis and self-control to the rough and downtrodden mood of the defeated. Time improved his temper, but something got lost on the way. It was as if Joana had died. In a way, she had. She’d never called Eduardo again in the decade that followed, but the gossip reverberating through unconscious wood told that Eduardo scoured for phone numbers and searched the internet for his granddaughter’s whereabouts. He never found a thing.

Until he did.

Eduardo was in the kitchen against Leandro’s orders. His grandson had asked him not to use the stove when alone. The smell of fish — not salmon, but cod — floated across the living room, sticking to my wood and my seat. And it lingered there for over an hour. I worried, but I was a chair. What could I do beyond worrying? I stood there and did nothing even when the salty scent of cod transformed into that of fire.

“God!” I heard Eduardo’s gasp from the kitchen. “Leandro, come here. Not again, please! No, no!”

The fire alarms he’d installed nine years before sprang to life.

Eduardo came out from the kitchen and stood with a hand on the table, back slightly bent forward, eyes hollow. For a moment, it was like he was having a heart attack. His hands shivered through the table and it thrilled through me, coming from the table’s foot that was touching my own.

“Vô!” Leandro’s voice. “What’s that smell?”

At this point, smoke was spreading through the room.

“My son, let’s get out of here.” Eduardo finally moved, and my barbs shifted in relief. “Get the chair.”

“What are you talking about?” Leandro didn’t stop. He ran to a closet in the small corridor that led to the kitchen and grabbed a fire extinguisher. He was precise. Years ago, Eduardo had paid firemen to provide instructions for him and Jeff.

“Let’s save our lives, Leandro,” Eduardo muttered, his hands still on the table. “Get the chair. The one with the seahorses.”

In the kitchen, I heard the fire extinguisher pouring its chemical on the flames with rapid swooshing jets. It muted Eduardo’s whimpering.

Leandro came back several minutes later and his Vô was still static with his hand on the table, looking at the door as if unable to reach it.

“We lost the oven,” Leandro said, smudges of gray on his face and shirt. “What got into you, Vô?” He wasn’t angry but his voice was mildly sad.

“Joana’s thesis is called The Migration Flow of Saltwater Fish in the Southern Shores of Portugal. I found it on a webpage.”

“Is it?” Leandro wiped the sweat on his brow, his eyes escaping his grandfather’s gaze. He opened all the windows and sent a text, probably to the house insurance. When he turned back to Eduardo, he shook his head and ushered him to one of the chairs, pulling it out for him.

“I’m not worried about Joana, Vô. The house caught fire. I’m worried about you.”

Leandro kneeled before him and grasped his hands.

“I shouldn’t have been born like this . . .” Eduardo wept. “With these hands . . .”

Leandro frowned. “What?”

“That stool . . .”

“You said something about a chair minutes ago. What’s that?”

Eduardo’s gaze was far away, not here and not at the now, but it quickly focused on Leandro. Completely lucid. And he spoke for the first time about his past. While he was at it, I could feel his body shifting in the chair. Not shivering, but releasing something out of him.

“Joana and you were safe in the garden. I came back inside to save your parents, then I saw the stool. It didn’t seem like anything serious, right? Just a burst outlet, right? Do you remember that day?”

Leandro shook his head and mouthed a negative. His lips fluttered.

“I was quick. I bragged about being a quick man back then, you know? I hurried inside, saw the stool, brought it outside. Ten seconds? Maybe thirty. Your parents were sleeping, so I had yet to wake them if the smell didn’t do it. So I ran back inside, climbed the stairs of that old house, and —”

Eduardo straightened his back. My legs clicked.

“Flames were blocking the door already. I heard them talking inside, I think. Trying to understand what was happening. I called them, but the floorboards crackled and pushed me back. I had to go back down the stairs. I called the fire department, but . . . The fire spread quickly in that old house. I screamed for them at the window, but all I saw were shadows as the fire spread through the curtains.”

“Why did you never tell me this?” Leandro’s voice was hoarse, his teeth clinking, but his hands still grasping those of his Vô.

“The firemen were quick enough, but it was too late. And your sis . . . Your sis waited for me with you on her lap. She was sitting on the stool. She was trembling. She was — she was crying a lot and you were too. And the first thing she said to me was . . . it was . . . She asked me why did I bring the stool out first? She was twenty then; you were barely six months.”

“And why did you?” Leandro pulled out a chair and sat facing his grandpa.

“I gave it life once. It was my duty to save it.”

Leandro just gaped at Eduardo, their hands stitched together and resonating with the table, the chairs, the floorboards, me. Leandro could have asked him anything at that point. Whether that was the reason Joana didn’t like him, whether he’d consciously saved a stool knowing he could be sacrificing his son and his daughter-in-law, whether the seahorse chair in the living room also had life. Instead, he just stooped forward and embraced Eduardo. They sat like this for a while, still resonating, smelling like smoke and fire.

I could never say if Leandro believed his grandfather. If I had to guess, I’d say he picked something in the middle. Perhaps he called Joana to confirm the story about the stool, perhaps he researched about blessed woodworkers only to find nothing at all. Perhaps he didn’t care as long as he had his Vô with him.

In the end, it didn’t matter. My time with the Amorims was over.

Eduardo died seven days later of a heart attack.

---

– 6 –

The house went on sale. This time, the SOLD sign was placed on a pole in the house’s garden. It was sad to see João Gutierrez’s employees again. They bought back the furniture, probably to bring it back to its origins and restart the wood cycle. Leandro and João Gutierrez didn’t speak too long about numbers. They signed a deal and the gang started to shift everything I knew, everything I could call home. Only I was spared. Leandro didn’t want to sell me, so perhaps he’d found a sliver of truth in his grandfather’s words.

I moved to Leandro and Jeff’s apartment. Like Eduardo, my days were ending. Oak trees could last for millennia, but only as long as they were nurtured by the soil. Furniture lasted as long as it was preserved, taken care of, and properly maintained in the appropriate environment. Which held true for feelings too, now that I thought of it.

Life in Leandro and Jeff’s apartment was never the same. Sun bathed me during the morning and part of the afternoon, its rays sneaking in through electronic blinds. But I didn’t care anymore. I was placed to lead a glass table with two sets of plastic chairs that didn’t even smell of anything authentic. But I also didn’t care about leading. All I cared about was seeing how Leandro was happy. And Jeff. And after a couple of years, the four-year-old girl they brought home. Sarah.

It was Sarah who broke me, I must confess. My legs weren’t as fierce as Anatólia’s hands anymore, so one day they just snapped. Sarah hurt her knees but it was just the beginning for those tiny bones. Leandro tried to repair me, visibly sad, mentioning to Jeff and Sarah how I was important to his Vô. How I should be kept, how I should be repaired. But I was beyond my days. The mildew growing through my seat could tell.

I didn’t want anything more either.

Leandro and Jeff shipped me to spend my last couple of months in private storage rented at Wood & Depot’s warehouse. It was dark and damp, and only through a small hatch window did the sunlight rarely filter in. What would become of me? Didn’t matter. All I knew was my consciousness, Anatólia’s gift, was fading fast. But I must tell you that I’ve never been so glad in my life, because right there in the dark, remembering little Sarah’s giggles, I discovered I was one of the Amorims. And we were made of oak.

 

 

 

 

 

---

Host Commentary

So: last time we followed our nameless protagonist, a finely carved chair, from the moment of his conception at the talented hands of the carpenter Anatólia, whose craft and concentration was such that it imbued the chair with consciousness. Alas, Anatólia died before our chair could be given to her intended recipient, and instead all her furniture ended up in a Wood & Depot branch, mouldering for years in the shadows, unnoticed and starved of attention—until Eduardo Amorim, a wealthy patriarch, came in to refurnish his house in preparation for his granddaughter’s return from her studies abroad after six long years.

Our chair found itself in a position of honour at the head of the dining table, bathed in morning light each day and given careful attention and cleaning by Eduardo, who had an obvious love of and knack with wood. Joana returned, but it was not the joyful homecoming that Eduardo clearly yearned for—Joana was distant, dismissive, and ultimately departing after only a week, declaring over dinner that she had come back wanting to give Eduardo a second chance, but found she couldn’t. She left before sunrise the next day, and left Eduardo a broken man, eyes red-swollen and hands shaky.

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair” by Renan Bernardo, who has been here before to spectacular effect with episode 737, “The Eight Hundred Legs of the Rio-Niterói Bridge”, which made me cry in public when I read it. He’s been at Escape Pod three times as well: 834, Anticipation of Hollowness; 863, A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity; and 932, The Walking Mirror of the Soul. His collection, Different Kinds of Defiance came out this year, and you can find out more about that at his website http://renanbernardo.com

This story was slow, and gentle, and took its time to work into my heart; but that pace is, I think, the point, and woven through every layer of what this is telling us.

Carpentry is slow, and gentle, when crafting a masterpiece for the family home—we still have the chair my Grandpa built some 60 years ago, passed down through my mum.

Life is, when we look back, slow, and gentle, with the frantic moments sanded down and only the curve and arc of periods remaining.

And above all, family love is slow, and gentle—never the furious heat of romantic lust so often the focus of art, but the slow-burning, slow-growing depth of decades together, sharing experiences and in-jokes and understanding of each other and ourselves—because that, I think, as my youngest turns 11 this year and my wife and I celebrate 16 years together, is what family has really given me. It has given me a home, for sure, and warmth and love and peace and the grounding to go out and build something of my life in the world: but more valuable than all that, and that is a very valuable accounting indeed, is the space and time to understand myself through them and as reflected in them.

I see in my kids the parts of myself I didn’t understand at their age, and in trying to help them deal with these struggles, I help myself—both the 10 year old that’s still somewhere inside me and needed that compassion, and the near-40 year old on the outside that is fighting to learn self-compassion. Watching another human grow for their entire lives is a very particular kind of privilege—and lest I start to sugar coat this too much, also an exhausting draining shouting arguing disobedient ignorant impossible anxious sort of privilege, every single infuriating day—but a privilege that gives you a very special viewpoint into them, and also into yourself.

And even after 16 years together, 14 married, Claire and I are still peeling back layers of each other, learning more about the other and how to love them best and give them the security they need and the healing for the buried traumas; and in doing so we’re learning all that about ourselves, too.

To live a slow and gentle life is to find your truth at the end of it, I hope. The world is insistent on pushing us into a rat race, a constant hustle, and so we are losing the time to know ourselves and each other; and so to resist that, to sit in one place and enjoy the warmth of the morning sun, the close attention of another, the love of the people we find ourselves with till we slip away; well, that is a very quiet kind of resistance, I think, but perhaps the one that is most important on the personal level.