The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko

could remember what kind. Oak. Fir. He’s ashamed in his realization that he cannot remember the wood. It may have been burl wood, much more likely that than oak. Or walnut. He should know it though. He should remember. It once belonged to his father. His father’s snuff box. It is here he keeps some of his smaller drafting tools—lead pencils, sharpener, slide rule, and compass. Eraser. He removes the pencils from the box, the heady lingering scent of snuff now layered over the bitter sharpness of lead and metal. He sees the evenings when he was a boy, watching his father, a stout ashen-haired man, take this box off the sideboard and remove its hand-carved lid. His father had carved it too—the amber-handled knife, pressing with a steady intention and focus, creating notches, which became cross-hatchings for sun rays or water. The careful precision of a knife’s cut. The wood’s minuscule shavings he’d collect from the carving—a refuse he liked to feel tickle the palm of his hands. The box was transformed. The at one time solid, plain lid soon became embellished with ornate cross-hatchings and rosettes, crescent moons. How superstitious the old man had been. It frustrated Austin so, now remembering the days before leaving when he’d scowl in disgust at his father and mother’s insistence that he take pause and sit for a while before his journey. How callous he’d been when his father had given him the box, thinking the man old, harmless, and just a bit ignorant. Disdain for the snuff box and its symbols, significant to his parents only, and their old beliefs and superstitions—the goddess Mokosh and her hold on the grain harvest, and the lectures and reminders to wear a belt, never place a hat on the table lest you lose money (or the bed in which case you could become ill), to always leave a pinch of snuff for the
domovoi
, the “he,” “the other half,” the “well-wisher,” who might pass in the night and thus bless the home and harvest—were the very things he’d so wanted to throw off.
    But there it is. The box beside him. A significance in that, Austin knows. Gifts that, in the giving, were to him a kind of burden now a relic he has come to love, the border of cross-hatchings pleasing, humming of home, soil and snuff, incense and icons. And could he not still smell the clove and camphor each time he opened the box?
    Out the window of his shop, he can see that the evening has moved on without his realizing it. Cars with their lights on now, streetlamps glowing in fanned skirts, men and women walking at a more relaxed pace, digesting dinners. He’s set out the drafting papers, considering the whys and reasonings for the lack of a letter. Perhaps the designs he’d sent had been lost in the mail. It is something he knows is liable to have happened. The country’s postal system is a precarious one at best. His work may be stuck in a mail processing plant—in the state of Sonora or across the border. Stranded. The designs could be sitting at the bottom of a burlap mailbag in the Midwest or left on a sidewalk where pedestrians may now be trampling upon his envelopes unaware, leaving footprints of street dust or gutter rain, he thinks, all the while watching the passersby on the sidewalk.
Watch where you step,
he suddenly shouts out to them, as if they are representative of all pedestrians and so bear a responsibility, are culpable, for his besmirched drafts. Oh, but there is no way to be quite certain of any of this. As a reassurance he decides that he will simply send his designs again. He will mail them tomorrow because while he does not have any verifiable proof that these scenarios have in fact occurred, they do remain possible. He will vary the probability. Tip the balance in his favor and send them again. It will not hurt, he thinks, though he also understands that he could never really know, be certain of, anything. One