The Friar loved the wavering nature of day.
Sweeping sunsets so expansive that they spill from the edges of their easel. A skyline so basked in resplendent orange that no man or god could prepare a sonnet to fully describe its lustre. The fading light that swells with the passion of fire and then solemnly recedes into hues of ochre and green.
Then the bountiful morning will follow. Each new day conducted into its symphonic prelude by the melody of birdsong. The calm of sunrise; first light upon the waters of a stony creek, a portrait of dancing light cast through the brambles of draping willows and then passed across the wind-combed grasslands.
The day was so perfect in its creation, the night was glorious by its every facet. But, if he was ever asked to choose, if the Friar was made to select one moment in which he would exist until his final breath, he would have chosen the morning.
It was morning, a faint kind of marmalade sun rose with a tired amble over the sleepy abbey of Huxley-shire.
Still drowsy, several jolly honeybees flew in lazy loops around the garden and occasionally collided with one another in the air bleary-eyed–the single-minded coordination of the swarm still as yet to get their many-legged trousers on. The abbey goat, who was a ruminative creature blessed by the simplicity of knowing the moods of the gods and of spirit, foresaw shapes in the gathering ether and noted the day to hold a mischievous air. There was an uneasy pall hanging over the abbey and the old goat decided wander away towards the far side of the meadow, just so that it wouldn’t have to be swept up in anything bordering on the fantastical.
Small beings wove plots of ill omen; it was a day where something terrible was bound to go wrong.
For someone anyway.
The routine of morning had taken on a frustrated note for the Friar.
He wandered through the abbey with the angst of finding a strange button at the bottom of a wash basket. There was an itch to the beginning of this day that his breakfast was unable to ameliorate.
There was nothing to be done; no delusion would make it right. He had lost the key to the abbey.
The key had a hook, it was a nice hook. He had nailed it up just by the doorframe so that it would be of use whenever he arrived home. The Friar knew that the key should be on the hook and he remembered placing it there with deliberate care last night; he had even wished it well as he retired to his bedchamber.
But today, a distinct portrait of absence sat alone atop the empty hook.
‘Ah.’ said the Friar to sun-filled morning while chuckling at his foolish memory. The key was obviously still in the lock outside. A trip to the Copperpot Inn and a tipple of lilac wine had left him dottery as he returned yesterday; a faint slight expected to be made once or twice by a hard-working man, such as himself.
Opening the door with a relived levity, the Friar was disheartened to find that the lock was completely keyless.
‘Oh drat!’ He spat, coming as close to swearing as he was capable of while sober*. It wasn’t there. He was certain that he had left it there. Patting down the parts of his robe that had never held pockets, the Friar attempted to recall if there were any gods related to the location of misplaced sundries. He scratched his head and moved back inside to check the hook again.
There was a key, that much he knew. Locks needed a key to function as a thing, to be unlocked–although when left alone such things were perfectly happy to remain right on being locked. That’s what made them work; they were simple, they were patient.
Lost for a direction forward, the Friar kept scratching at his worried brow and tried to imagine every place in the abbey that the key could possibly be.
The trouble was that he was getting forgetful. The Friar had, admittedly, always been forgetful. The exact moment where his memory had begun to fade was elusive to recall; and so, alas, he was doomed to be forever getting forgetful and never actually gotten.
Although, it was not as though he didn’t have a memory. He could remember a myriad of facts about gardening: he could pick a daffodil from a cowslip at fifty paces and then speak at length on the best fertiliser for lush meadows. He was verbose; he could recount any word that was written down in the abbey library, in fact, he would be able to, on cue, recount an entire dictionary with a flurry and a flutter, then rolling into the full etymology of each word, reciting their usage notes in frustratingly clear detail. It was just that the order of words was difficult to get his head around. People said words, people said a lot of words. He would flip through the pages of his mind as they spoke and remember the fun words either side of whatever it was they were actually saying. A simple S–that expressive little letter– could saturate his sponge-like sentience and leave the spoken sentence solvent. Such a shame indeed.
He was just easily distracted, he thought while checking the hook for a third time and enjoying the remembrance of the word susurration. Yes, that was his problem, distraction.
From the fireplace a small creature no bigger than a thumb of coal was unable hide its laughter.
It grabbed at its sides while it coughed and spluttered, trying desperately to remain unheard from its lampblack throne.
It was sure that the soot would be a giveaway. Scampering footprints tracing its path were always left behind as tiny piles of ash, and the hearth sprite wondered if it should steal a few bristles from the broom on next time that it left the fireplace.
It was a creature of mischief.
Born from the detritus of a forgotten chore; house spirits were by and large kept relatively harmless when a home was swept. They revelled in botheration. There were the pipe knockers, the draw wedgers, the milk souring curdle-durdle-plop. There were insidious spirts who made hidden pathways for leaks, there were objectional bundles of unthreaded wool who were the bane of every washerman and woman the world over. But it was the most mischievous house sprit of them all, the hearth sprite, who had taken up residence in the Abbey of Huxley-shire. A hearth sprite was cunning, it could steal the ink from a pen as it was being used and have it turn up in a shirt pocket one week later. It moved things after they were put down: coins, an important letter, the spirit was able to disappear anything it could carry and would return them just when frustration of searching had passed a boiling point.
Sitting atop its mound of ash, the hearth sprite wiped a sooty hand across brickwork and wondered why the Friar had neglected to light a fire in so long. A sprite could only find life in the ash of a forgotten fireplace, and, as far as it could tell, it had been alive for more than five seasons of snow.
The Friar was a curiosity. He would fuss over his garden, carefully shaking a mist of water at flowers too fragile to stand a raindrop. He dusted and swept the abbey each week, whistling to himself as he kept his home tidy. But despite his neatness, the man always neglected his fireplace.
Dragging a large key out of the collected ash, the hearth sprite made two blurring leaps up to the mantle and crouched behind an unwound clock. It was an awkward thing for such a small spirit to hide, and metal was always a tricky subject for any house sprit. But the admiration of its craft drew the hearth sprite to relish in what it saw as a challenge.
Placing the key upon the clock with delicate care, the sprite felt his stomach drop away as the blasted contraption made three quick ticks and then a single sonorous gong.
‘One O’clock already?’ The Friar mused, turning to his study and immediately seeing a homely little fellow holding its ears while moving about mantle.
‘Oh, hello little one,’ he said.
‘What!?’
‘Are you the fireplace lizard?’
‘Lizard!’ the hearth sprite shouted over the ringing still echoing around its ears, ‘Do I look like any flamin’ lizard that you’ve saw?’
Shaking its head and making a dart for the fireplace, the sprite still found itself still off-balance enough that it could only flail as it careened toward an empty basket; thudding into the wood with a much more gravity that it was rightly expecting.
Oh, the sprite thought pensively, now realising the nature of its predicament, a circle of iron.
Two looping bands of the horrid stuff encircled the basket and gave the blasted bucket all the rural charm of a half-cut rum barrel, or as to the hearth sprite’s dilemma, a very effective prison.**
‘Yes, they’re the ones,’ the Friar clapped his hands and recalled one of his favourite words, ‘A salamander! I thought that I saw one, oh, I can’t remember when, so I’ve not lain a fire in some time. Oh, you found my key!’
Holding its head in the time-honoured slump of a lamenter, the hearth sprite cursed the Friar and glumly wondered what it had done to deserve such rotten luck. Bad things were supposed to happen to people, not house sprits.
‘Hooray,’ it said weakly, dripping with asinine reluctance, ‘could you tip me out of this bucket by any chance? Mr? didn’t catch your name there.’
It needed to learn the man’s name, there was power in a spirt being given a human’s name.
‘Ah, a name. Yes… just Friar will do I think, everybody calls me that. Now where did we used to hang this key? I’d forget my own name if I could put it down.’
The sprite sunk further into misery.
‘You’ve forgotten your name, haven’t you?’
‘In a manner, yes,’ said the Friar as he wandered about the study looking for a place to leave the key that he wouldn’t then forget about later, ‘but it’s no bother. Dear me, you’ve really tracked soot all over the place, stay there I’ll go fetch some water and you can have a wash.’
This was bad, the sprite didn’t know what water would do to a spirit made of forgotten fireplaces and it wasn’t too keen to find out. Willing itself to jump, the distressed spirt leaped again and again but was unable to leave the circle. Furious in its misfortune the hearth sprite stamped and pushed at the wall of the bucket, straining to tip it sidewards or unseat the iron band. When it escaped from the circle, it decided, it was absolutely going to smash the clock. One big push and a nice dance amongst the wreckage of cogs and broken time.
Coming back into the room with a kettle and a small stack of kindling, the Friar hummed as he swept the ash from the fireplace and set the wood into a neat pile, then placing the kettle on a stove hook so as to warm the water. Patting his pocketless robes for a flint and steel, the forgetful Friar pondered for a moment and remembered that he couldn’t recall the last time he had seen either.
‘I don’t suppose you have a match?’ he said, halted by the surprise of an empty bucket and a diminutive pile of soot where the little creature had been.
‘Where did you go?’
Within the building dawn, a shape flickered within the fragility of a will-o-wisp. A house spirit is never truly lost as their waxing and waning dictates that life shall forever be transient for a creature born from ether. They return to neglected hinges; they poke holes in poorly maintained thatch. Life would continue, and the abbey would forever have its chores. But the Friar was unbothered, he had the rest of the morning to look forward to.
~
Chewing thoughtfully on a rosebush, the abbey goat considered its prediction for the day.
Luck.
There was a different manner of luck to the morning and as to how the sun had risen. There was a mischief in the air, sure. But it was a strange mischief; it was well intentioned in a way; stubborn things were bound happen to unpleasant people. It was a clever kind of luck. It was the kind of luck that is neither bad nor good but preys on coattails of arrogance.
Seeing a faint eddy of wind pull lightly across the meadow, the goat noted a presence to the air beside him.
There’s more luck in life than others notice, it thought as something helpfully scratched at an itch behind its horns, she must be a busy god old, Lenith.
Patting the goat on its head, the goddess of luck smiled as she looked off toward the abbey and her field of clover laying peacefully in the morning sunlight.
‘Nah, not really,’ she said, as she let the breeze carry her spirit wherever it may, ‘I just pop by when people care to notice.’
~
*After a flagon of the Copperpot Inn’s rambunctious turnip wine, the Friar’s countenance was known to take on a much more evocative manner than his regular speech. Such was the efficacy of his language that even the most verdant spring day in a year of Sundays would consider its sky to be less blue than the colourful outbursts from the merry Friar.
**Long suspected to be impassable for a spirt, the humble ring of iron, or any iron for that matter, had developed such a power over the imaginative house spirts that they believed the folktale into truth all by themselves. Finally proving that an unfocused imagination could in no doubt lead to some very dangerous ideas indeed.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 