Carving A Spoon

A short story by Mark Li.

In the days before Christmas, after my older brother Jacob left for war, my dad would spend hours down in the garage with his SOG knife carving wood. It was a core memory: him, deep in a crevice pathway fenced by cardboard boxes and water gallons, his back crouched over, his mouth held shut, his eyes so near to closing they looked like tiny slits on his face. His knife shaping the wooden block so deftly as if it were clay, the solid bending and curving at his very touch. His forehead, beaded with shiny drops of sweat. It was the first time he let me watch. He sat me down on a stool right next to him, and after a couple minutes with his sandpaper, he said, “Look,” and he held my finger and ran it over the smooth underside of the wood block, the one that was freshly sanded, and then the overside, which was yet to be so.

He said, “People are just like wood. All shaved and rough to different degrees. Remember that.” I nodded, and he placed my finger down and continued working until it was so dark he couldn’t see the knife in his hand anymore. By Christmas, he had a small spoon. It wasn’t too big, about the size of a teaspoon, and he tied it up with some ribbon and gave it to someone in the family. There was a section in the cutlery drawer just for Dad’s spoons.

Once, while he was doing this, my pointer finger caught on a raised groove, and a little piece of it splintered off, lodging deep into my skin. I cried out in pain, and my dad sucked his teeth and left to go get a tweezer, some iodine, and a Band-Aid.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, squeezing my finger. My hands gripped tightly on the metal rim of the stool.

“Yeah.” I winced. “A lot.”

“Okay then,” he said. “Try not to move.” He hovered the metal prongs over the splinter, trying to find the right angle to attack it. There was a focused glint in his eye, a life in his half-smile I couldn’t place. “You know, Ki? I want to ask you some questions, but I think they’d be a little too aged for you.”

“Age?” I hated that word. It kept me from doing a lot of things, mostly because I didn’t have enough of it. “I’m ten now,” I huffed. “That’s double digits. You can ask them.”

“Alright.” My dad pulled out a box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Band-Aids. “Which turtle’s your favorite?”

“Well, I like Donatello ‘cause he’s smart,” I said. “But Mikey’s cool too. But also Leonardo has that katana that goes–” I imitated swinging a sword, sound effects and all. Some time when I was doing that, he pulled out the splinter and applied the iodine, but I didn’t even notice.

“Looks like you're lucky then,” he said, and he blew a little on my finger. “You got Donny.”

I sat up. “Are you finished? Can I go now?”

“Maybe,” my dad said. “Just one more question–I’m curious. Do you think it’s wrong of me to make spoons?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, this.” He picked up the freshly-removed splinter and placed it delicately in the palm of my hand. “This came from the wood. And this is the reason why I have to sand it, so you and your mom don’t get hurt trying to eat soup, of all things. But you see, I changed it. It’s not the same as the wood I cut down from the tree. It’s a spoon now. Spoons don’t have splinters. Wood does. Do you understand?”

“Kinda,” I muttered, which is what I say when I don’t. My dad stared at me, and I knew at that moment he understood what I actually meant. He continued anyway.

“But sometimes, you can wear the wood down too much. Your side may be too rough. Maybe the wood doesn’t want to be a spoon. And you have to live with the fact that you forced another living thing to live the way it doesn’t want to. And sometimes, it breaks.”

I just sat there, blinking. My dad sighed.

“Guess that’s enough for today,” he muttered. He patted me on the back. “Alright then. You can go now.”

As I grew up, my dad became more distant, and he spent longer in his workshop. Some days, I barely saw him. Some days, I saw too much of him. When he died, we laid him to rest in a coffin he made for himself, and I stuck one of his spoons right up in the dirt like incense.

My brother Jacob’s grave sits right beside him.

I only have one fading memory of Jacob before the war. He was in his bedroom wearing only his pajama shorts, listening to The Animals all the way up. His short black hair covered his eyes. The thin skin of his cheeks were slowly turning purple, and he had bruises so bad they looked like burns. When he saw me come in, he gestured me over, and he held my head with one hand, firmly.

“Don’t you dare tell anyone,” he said. “Not Mom. Not Mr. Louis. Kay?” I nodded. He scanned me for ill intent, for any desire to do otherwise, but he found nothing. He leaned back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Cool. Go get me some ice from the freezer, alright?”

I think that was the first time I realized how rough Dad could be.

Now, as I’m carving my own spoon out of wood, I glance at my daughter, and her little brown eyes blink back at me. I smile and hold her finger to drag it with the grain of the wood.

“People are just like wood,” I tell her. “Shaved and rough. Each person to a different degree. Remember that."

A Chinese-Indonesian teen writer and California Arts Scholar, Mark Li (any pronouns) writes in the hope to reach out a hand to their younger self, who had difficulty making connections. When they’re not reading or writing in their journal, they like long walks on the beach and dreaming of being consumed by its depths.