Work Text:
Taisto wore his mother's scarf, the one she had knitted years ago when winters had still felt like a season Taisto eagerly awaited, when they had been filled with holiday cheer and warm nights curled up by the fire. The wool still carried the faint smell of her soap, even though she was long dead.
Mom used to click her tongue at the two of them - father and son - when they came in from the mine, dust coating their skin and the same weary slope to their shoulders. "Go wash," she would say, already turning back to the stove. "You look like you've dug your way out of a grave."
As a boy Taisto had wanted exactly that. An aunt long gone south had given him a plastic helmet that never fit quite right and a toy pickaxe whose handle had worn smooth in his hands. He had spent whole afternoons behind the house hacking at the ground, waiting for the real man to come home so they could stand side by side, identical in the dust. That had been the entire silhouette of his childhood dream: to become the same man, to walk the same path, to carry the same weight without complaint.
And Taisto had done it. He had followed the footsteps down that dead end road, into the same hole, earning the same thin wages, spending the same nights stuck staring at the same four walls, day after day, year after year. His life had turned into a snake swallowing its own tail, going round and round and round in the dark until the day the mine closed and the tail was suddenly gone, leaving the snake all tangled up with nothing left to eat and nowhere left to go.
The wind pulled against the scarf, and Taisto was reminded of a moment many years ago, standing outside with his mother to watch the stars one late Christmas night, her mittens pressed carefully over his ears to keep them warm.
Now, years later, she still kept them warm, as Taisto contemplated what he would do next.
If he followed his father the rest of the way - if he found a quiet place, a locked door, sought out that same final sound - would the old man look at him from wherever the dead went and see only the son who couldn't endure?
And if Taisto kept going? If he reached Helsinki and found some other pit to crawl into, some other set of thin walls and even thinner pay? Would that not be the greater failure - proving the cycle could not be broken, only relocated? The same story, a different setting. Only this time, he wouldn't be choosing it with the naivety of a child who thought becoming his father would bring him closer to the man.
Taisto drew the scarf tighter against his ears. The world went soft and far away, the way it had under her mittens.
Either way, he thought, the old man would know.