Two friends sat by a flour cart in a dampened glade of hanging willow and watched as the distant sun made its way for the lantern of the moon. The day became warm as the rain slackened, and a soft light now filtered down into the grassland, moving about the shadows gently as if it were falling across the surface of a lake. Nostalgia would watercolour this moment, it would cast a galaxy of stars across the sky and illuminate the glade though a blazing sunset: a combination not only placed out of season, but also wholly impossible in nature. No, this was just a regular day in Huxley-shire. A timeless quiet filled the unspoken air in a way that felt so typical of country life. In the distance a crow cawed, a farmer swore at a stubborn cow, everything glowed in peacefulness.
Folding a knot of dough with practiced ease, Helga moved as if there were a lifetime of experience in her actions. The Millers had always run the mill of Huxley-shire, there was an autological weaving around her familial line that, if her ancestors were not so opposed to fanciful things such as allusions, could be best described as having flour in her blood.
A millstone was designed to be simple and the Millers believed that life around such things should be kept simple as well–lest the two one day find themselves between each other.
‘So, are there many people who want to kill you?’
The question was sudden. A deluge of memory rolled back over Myles with the burden of whatever he presumed a mill stone to weigh. A blade catching sunlight, a milk pail catching the assassin before he could strike. Helga had saved his life and he was still yet to thank her.
‘If you go by the numbers, I would say quite a few, but now that Druth is gone I could only guess. Two perhaps?’
When not threatened by physical violence, or confronted by the existence of talking rats, Myles could be hard to catch on the back foot. He had a dumb confidence that seemed unearned for someone so poor, and his guild teachers often assumed him to suffer insanity by way of bravado. He felt as though his life had been dragged along by a series on fortunate consequences, and now, he wondered if he had managed to miss a real chance at life somehow.
He was handsome, enough, in that road beaten way that boots could look after two seasons of careful scuffing. He had a canny natural inability to read the subtleties of conversation and his luck had led him to rob his way into an accidently fulfilling employment as the chef of a small country inn. But was this how people lived? Myles tried to push these thoughts away but kept coming back to his open assassination ticket and the memory of an entire guild of poshly unpleasant vagabonds. Did normal people have a death warrant? Would they forget about him? He sighed and considered the life of a Highwayman that he was destined towards, a mediocracy of existence that would likely end with a watching crowd and an awkwardly short drop. Like his father before him, Myles probably would spend a few years robbing stagecoaches, gain some notoriety as a rouge, and then save a maiden from an incredulous bank teller and then have a son he didn’t like. Sure, his foresight was limited to the fiction family history, but through four years of hiding in the guild kitchens, Myles had never really felt like a Highwayman to begin with.
‘They may send someone to find out what happened, but it would be easier for them to just say that I was dead and Druth went on a holiday to Versale*. I’ll always be a part of the guild though. Once you write you name in the ledger it stays there for life.’
‘The ledger can move around beforehand, can it? Or is this one of your two meaninged phrases?’ Helga was still focused serenely the dough, Myles had a moment of panic and wondered if he had just been teased. The friar had told him that the Miller family were practically without humour; that couldn’t have been a joke, could it? She looked up, smiled innocently, and poked him on the nose.
‘After each harvest the farmers will bring in sheafs of wheat to the mill and we begin our work. First the grain is tempered so that it splits. Then after a time the flour can milled, and the kernel is all that’s left behind.’
Shaping the dough into a neat bun, Helga made three cuts across its top and placed it aside to proof. The woodstove at the Dryford’s farm embered quietly, burning camphor scenting the air with the fragrance of departing spring.
‘Was that a metaphor?’ asked Myles as he scraped the half dry flour from the tip of his nose. She had to be teasing him.
‘A what?’ said Helga with the faintest of winks hidden behind a look of nearly genuine surprise, ‘I just thought that you’d like to know how the mill works; it rolls along everyday but people don’t often realise that it has changed something. It takes two things from a single beginning. And then they can even join back together to become something new,’ cracking her knuckles, Helga looked at Myles for a moment and then patted at one of the sacks laying in the back of her flour cart, ‘we call that one wholemeal.’
Myles felt a tear.
He had been at the Copperpot for two months now and had failed to notice the burn of worry knotted in his stomach as each day came to a close. He felt at home here, for the first time he felt that there was a place for him without trouble, a place where people seemed glad to see him. But there was a sadness at the heart of these thoughts. What had he done to deserve such a gift? When would his friends work out that he was not the person that he felt like he could be? When would they all leave him again? Leave him to be once again alone. He swallowed dryly and tried to settle his thoughts. Guilt was the worry that he could not seem to escape. Guilt that he was happy, guilt that he was finally proud. He vowed that he would not forget these feelings. Somehow, he would work with them, shape them into something useable and then, in time, find that he had no use for them anymore
Two friends sat by a flour cart as the sun had finally departed and the curtain of night enclosed its darkness across the sky. Lamps were struck and the noise of the farmhouse upon the hill rang out into the glade. The family were at dinner, an underscore of laughter filled the air and felt warmer than the embering stove nearby Myles and Helga.
Myles sighed and lay back against the cart.
Helga, stood, dropped the dough onto his head, and took off in a run across the glade.
Their laughter then rang out in harmony.
—
*Versale, a notably venomous country, has gained the allusion that holidaymakers will often remain much longer than originally intended–although not always through free will and most likely spent in the care of an infirmary ward.
Poisoned as Ponsford teabag, is a particularly bawdy tavern song that makes light of this.
2022
J. McCray
Sunday Short Stories 