Here is a piece I wrote for one of my uni weekly writing tasks. It concerns my relationship with axes over the years.
Handle.
The axe was… not really an axe, in any real sense of the word. The head was made of aluminium, double-sided, square, and angular – almost a cartoon of a battle axe. The haft, into which this sliver of soft metal was slotted and pinned, was the kind of exotic hardwood that window frames are made from.
I suppose, looking back, it’s about as much as one could have expected from a window fitter, but for a 7-year-old girl who had begged her father to read The Lord of the Rings to her and was obsessed with Gimli, it was perfect.
Well. I say perfect. The handle gave her splinters, and the head was loose and rattling the moment it was made. It also lasted about a week, before the girl decided that a large dead pine tree was a worthy foe. A giant. A balrog. A dragon. The weapons of mortals were no match for a creature of the First Age, and the handle shattered into pieces.
She buried the axe head, made of poor man’s mithril, in the roots of one of the big beech trees, in the woods near her grandparents’ house, thinking she’d return for it one day. Despite digging here and there, though, she never found it again.
*
Clunk. Scrape. A yelp of alarm.The axe fell, awkwardly, and skittered off the side of the log, its half-sharp edge glancing off of the railway sleeper that served as a makeshift chopping block. The smell of bitumen filled her nostrils even as blood drained from her face as she realised how close she had come to chopping into her own ankle, or worse.
She stooped, gingerly picking the log up from where it had rolled, into the bottom of a barbed-wire fence choked with nettles and thistles. Her back still bent, she placed the offending lump on her block once more, and stood up just in time for a stream of words to hit the back of her head
“Stupid bloody girl! What’re you playing at?”
“I’m cutting firewood, Gramps”, the girl replied, turning to regard the red-faced old man.
“Firewood! It’s bloody March, you daft cow…!” the man tucked his thumbs into his impossibly-high waistband, and pursed his lips before continuing in a begrudging tone “You could at least cut them into quarters. And when you’re done, stack them up by the back door”
“Yes, Gramps”, the girl replied meekly, sensing that she had got away with something. She watched as her grandfather nodded curtly, and turned to stalk off on his long legs, muttering something about “bloody axes”, and taking the smell of sileage and tobacco with him.
*
Screech. A laboured whine. The hum and whirr of an underpowered machine spinning down to rest.
A smudged and burn-pocked hand placed an axe-head on the anvil amongst its brothers and sisters, the edges gleaming bright against the slate grey of the rest of the metal. The air was heavy with the smell of wood dust, and powdered steel, and the lingering smell of old vegetable oil that had been briefly superheated by a piece of steel glowing a dull orange at nearly 800° C.
Picking up her hammer, wood worn smooth and familiar from years of use, the girl selected an axe handle from the ones she’d prepared. This last axe was just about as big as she could forge on her own, big enough to warrant a small felling axe handle – what was known as a “Boy’s Axe” handle. She smiled sardonically as she considered the name, and placed the end of the handle into the eye of the axe, driving it in with a few sharp blows from the hammer, cursing as one of the strikes dented the edge of the wood more than she’d intended. Not to worry. It would sand out.
Once the axe-head was seated, and wedged with wood, and cross-wedged with an iron wedge (which she’d forged while waiting for the tempered heads to cool), and the linseed oil and beeswax she’d applied to the artfully-scorched handle had dried, she picked up the axe, and went to test its keen edge on a branch of a fallen tree, the one that had come so close to crushing her home that Winter.
Dani O'Shea 