short fiction · 2026-10-18

Whispers of Cedar

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

When I lit the incense, a thin cedar smoke curled upward, carrying with it the faint echo of my grandfather's workshop, where he taught me to sand wood and listen to the grain. The scent slipped into my nostrils, and suddenly the floorboards became planks of pine, the air humming with the low murmur of his voice. In that breath the present dissolved, replaced by a memory of his calloused hands shaping a tiny chair, the smell of sawdust, the warm glow of the lamp. The fragrance acted as a key, turning dust into story, and I felt the quiet pride of having inherited more than timber — I inherited a lineage of careful hands.