154 words. I started writing this at the end of November and promptly forgot about it. I am posting it right now to get back into the habit. I promise something new and decidedly more finished tomorrow.

~


The sign swayed in the breeze, hung up rusting iron eyelets and creaking as it did. It read “The Thieving Magpie” in raised letters with an impish bird with a pin held in its beak and a coin tucked under its wing. I stood there, watching it go back and forth. The rest of the world seemed distant then, as if I were bewitched or entranced. The sound of hooves clip-clopping against the stone road, the murmured conversations of men and women walking and going about their business in converging and scattering waves were only phantoms to my senses.

It was in the spring when I came. April. I was but a lad of sixteen, left the Podunk countryside to set off on my own in the big city. Thames.

A squawk and a brush of feathers snapped me back to reality, as a Fellpool riding upon the back of a moa tramped by.