The Breathing of Wood

It was as if a master stonemason had packed the wood into the shed, each pie-shaped split seated into a near perfectly corresponding V, chinked with tinder wherever the slightest gap remained. The old man doubted he could wedge the blade of his penknife into the neatly ricked seams. 

     “She’s got to breathe a little, son,” he said to the boy of the pile, though in the still of his thinking he felt the well of pride, knowing that it was his own blood’s doing, a generation leaped, that had given the boy this keen eye. “Be ten years drying, racked up that pretty.”