I always thought there was something holy about the way Papa touched wood. His hands, though scarred and calloused, had a grace to them—like they remembered every grain of the trees he’d shaped in his younger years. Before Mama got ill, she taught me how to read and write. While Papa was mostly in his workshop making clockcases, gun stocks, and so many other beautiful artifacts; after Mama passed away, I entertained myself with painting and reading, between the pages I could break loose from the room that sometimes could feel like a coffin or a cage. Occasionally we went to the market near the harbor to procure some things for the evening meals, there I’d pause outside, arrested by the sight of the sun dipping low over the water, casting molten gold across the sails of the anchored ships. The horizon stretched like the edge of a dream. I’d stand there, lost in it, until Papa, with his collar buttoned high and his hands neatly clasped behind his back, would clear his throat not harshly, but with precision. ‘One mustn’t dawdle,’ he’d say, though his eyes lingered a moment too long on the same view, as if he, too, felt the poetry of it, and simply refused its entry." We lived in a house where each room was a museum of magnificent relics and artworks. His workshop was his chapel, and the walls were lined with guns and paintings. Not guns from wars or crime scenes, but antiques. Curved, polished stocks, golden inlays, flintlocks that looked like they belonged to kings and pirates alike. The house smelled of cedar and turpentine, and every surface—walls, floors, even the beams above our heads—bore the quiet fingerprints of his craft.

He began collecting guns after he's hands grew unsteady ...yet he still enjoyed refining firearms. Elijah Rosewood's gun collection had a good reputation in Boston.

“Guns are to protect,” he would say, without looking up from his work. “Not to fight. A weapon is only a weapon if it forgets its purpose.”

“They’re misunderstood,” he told me once, tracing the smooth lacquered stock of a flintlock pistol he’d restored. “People see war, blood... I see discipline. Art. Even a chisel in hands with bad intentions can be lethal but one can not blame the chisel.”

“When Mama was still with us I wasn’t allowed near the guns, but a few years after I was taught how to honor them. Papa showed me how to oil the metal, how to varnish the wood until it gleamed like honey. It was one of the few things we truly did together. Our house was full of contradictions. It hummed with beauty and danger all at once—paintings of elegant sights, guns too beautiful to trust. I painted upstairs. He curated downstairs. We respected each other's worlds. Or tried to. After all, all that I had left Was him!

That was until the day Mr.Eliot Collier stepped into our lives and changed the way the house breathed; he was a wealthy collector from the city with hands too soft for tools and eyes too sharp to miss what others overlook. He heard about my father's collection and came to see the guns, and stayed for the conversation.

Papa explained to him that if he wants to do refinements on a piece he'd be glad to help but the items in the collection are not for sale.

First, it was Papa's collection that amazed him, but after a while, it felt like he was here for anything but the guns.

He was mesmerized by the paintings in the hallway

Some were drawn by my hands and some the ones my father brought back with him from his journeys, I found it rather flattering that he mentioned My paintings to be like a tender caress to the eye!

May I ask who painted this fine piece? Collier asked

"She did", papa said with his proud eyes on me

"Miss Rosewood? Indeed. He continued admiring "To be honest I'm captivated by pleasant fine work of your fingers miss Rosewood!" said Collier.

"Thank you for your kind words Mr.Collier but I thought your interest is in my father's gun collection," I said

"I came here to see for myself the magnificence of the rare rifles in Mr.Rosewood's collection, But now I see he holds things far more precious than antique rifles." He replied

"Owning things Mr.Collier, is easy; what matters most is preserving them!" said Papa.

Papa didn’t like him much, to him he was nothing but an intruder at that point, but he was persistent, and a witty speaker.

I enjoyed his company, It felt delightful to have a conversation.

“Collier visited more often. Brought books, paintings, even spiced sweets he said came from Morocco. I loved the stories. The sounds of other places. But Papa grew colder each time he came. I recall when he said to me, "Not every cage has bars, my girl, nor every jailer holds a whip."

Collier started appearing during my painting hours more often, asking questions he already knew the answers to. His fascination started with the weapons, but it ended with my brushes. Or maybe it never ended.

He came by one evening around dinner time, and I offered him a seat at the table. Mr. Collier brought up something as if the thought was disturbing him for quite a while; "Mr Rosewood, I've heard that you used to be a very crafty carpenter, how come a carpenter finds tools made for killing admirable?” papa gave a smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He smiled, but it wasn’t like anything I'd seen on his face before!

"Guns aren’t tools for killing. They’re instruments for warning,” he replied, his voice calm but edged, the words carrying more weight than their softness allowed. “To keep things safe, you'd know better if you understood their language.” It wasn’t just a statement—it was a warning, veiled in reason. Mr. Collier didn’t answer. He simply stood up and grabbed a flintlock pistol off the shelf and ran his fingers along its stock, slow and deliberate, as though the grain of the wood might reveal whether the truth lay in words or in steel. It was a gesture that said enough: he had heard the warning—and chosen to ignore it.

The next day Mr.Collier came again; He spoke of cities I had only read about. Istanbul. Marrakesh. Paris. Each name like a little golden bell ringing in the air between us. He said there was a place for someone like me out there—a girl with a painter’s hands and a hunger for more than these walls. But there was a craving in him now that I couldn't tell if I liked it or not, one that made me flinch when he looked at me too long and suddenly restrained his gaze.

That evening, I caught Papa watching us through the reflection of the hallway glass. Not looking at Mr.Collier, not at me—just... watching.

Collier left with my father after a long conversation with a wrapped-up rifle! They exited the house that night, but I never saw Collier again.

I asked Papa about it. "he had to go back to the city," he replied. "Some urgent thing. People like him don’t stay long in places."

Then he said something as if he was talking to himself: "And sometimes they collect things they don't understand."

I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t argue.

The guns were still polished, always displayed with reverence. He locked the door behind him whenever he went inside. But I peeked through the keyhole! There was a rifle on the table. Like it had become the heart of the collection, the way he stared at it made me feel like I had peeked on something intimate. I heard whispers as if he was murmuring to someone else... one morning while peeking through I saw him scrubbing and polishing the rifle nervously as if it was in terrible condition, though it was spotless. Gradually the house changed as well as Papa, Not so much later I found him, painting. He’d never picked up a brush before in his life. He dipped into reds mostly. Variants of crimson, oxblood, and alizarin. Soon he replaced the canvas with walls, first, his workshop that bloomed in shades of deep red, staining the air.

Then in the living room—scarlet brushstrokes creeping along the walls like ivy. Not in my style. Not mine at all.

Then all the downstairs hallway!

“Trying to make the place warmer,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

His eyes looked red too. Tired. Wet. Or maybe it just reflects the walls.

One night, I found him sitting by the hearth, with the chisel on his lap. He noticed my presence by the sound of the floor under my steps and looked at me with eyes so unsure and filled with doubt. “Do you think,” he asked quietly, “that something used to protect... can ever forget what it’s done?”

I didn’t know what he meant. Some part of me wanted to stay ignorant and naive, I couldn’t bare with my imagination for the first time in my life.

I said, “Yes.” Because he needed to hear it. He nodded. “Then why can’t I?” he wept while I comforted him with gentle strokes. I had no words. The red crept upstairs after that. Slowly. The hallway first. Then the kitchen. Then my studio. It was beautiful at first, in a way. The house looked like it was wrapped in a sunset that never faded. But then it didn’t feel like warmth. It felt like bleeding. I figured Papa talked to the gun more than he talked to me. Sometimes I heard him whispering things behind the locked door: apologies, promises, maybe prayers. I asked him once if he missed Mom. “whenever I lay my eyes on you,” he said, “I failed to protect her, but I'm not going to let anyone harm you.”

"No one wants to harm me, papa," I said, But I wanted to scream. To ask what he’d done. But something inside me—some cautious, careful part—kept me still. I knew he loved me. But love doesn’t always mean safe. One day, I returned from the market to find the workshop door open. I stepped inside, and there he was—standing in the center of the room, drenched in red. His hands, his arms, his face, all covered in red paint. He looked at me. His eyes were empty, distant. And then, I saw it. The tremor in his hands, the brokenness in the set of his jaw. He was crying, silently, as if his tears had long forgotten how to fall in a way that mattered. For a moment, I stood there, frozen. The man I had known, the man I had tried to understand, was slipping away from me—slipping into something I couldn’t reach! I approached him slowly, with a care I had never given him before, as though he might shatter at my touch. I wrapped my arms around him, not out of comfort, but out of sheer necessity—like holding a man standing at the edge of a cliff, one step from falling.

"I want you safe my darling," he said.

"I am safe with you papa," I said.

“I love you,” I whispered, the words leaving my mouth as if they were the last tether between us. I loved him. I must have, to say those words in the face of this madness. But at that moment, I knew, deep in my bones, that it was no longer the man I loved—it was the shadow of him, clinging to the man I once knew.

I cleaned the rifle instead of him. Reverently. Like he used to. And for a moment, just a second, I thought I saw something—just beneath the varnish. A thin, dark vein that didn't belong to the wood. But when I blinked, it was gone, just like so many malicious intentions that I refused their entry. Just the reddish-brown stock. Smooth. Ornate. Beautiful And warm. , Papa didn't leave the house anymore. He said the world is too loud. Too dangerous. I stopped letting him in his workshop and made sure the door was locked. He would snap with his hands trembling even standing against the doorframe, Watching, Waiting, Bleeding in ways no one else could see. And so I painted. I painted to keep the house whole. I painted the red sunset burning like lava, I painted to preserve what remained of us; of a fragile blue canary scared in an elegant cage made of fine Rosewood and with its golden door bars ajar; and of a rifle, leaning against a wooden wall with floral paintings, all bleeding; I kept these paintings for myself and locked them up in the workshop! I still listen for the silence between the screams. I know now that The line between protection and violence is thinner than varnish! And I can truly see that in his eyes, red never really fades, and as I see the reflection of what's in his eyes in my own I understand that I can't stand it anymore!

I shall follow the setting sun down to the harbor where it surrenders itself to the sea, where the light ends and where the fleeting ships sail towards the horizon while the sun gently bows and slips beneath the waves into the blue, like something too tired to rise ever again.