Village
harvest festival, marrows big as three-year-olds, piglets with two heads, jams
and hams, ale and rose-hip wine drunk to excess by red-faced farmers and their
wives.
I,
disguised, occupied the fortune-teller’s booth; promised death or love or money
as desired to successive gullibles.
But
I was the bigger fool: Mathias the final
customer. He knocked me down, played Punch to my Judy and,
while Gabriel wrestled with a farmer’s son, kicked life from my belly, leaving
me in hopeless lonely labour. With a
screech ‘twixt owl and vixen I expelled bloody pulp, then a second lifeless
babe burst forth.
This
is part 40 of 'The blacksmith's wife'. The whole is a prompt-led
serial which began on the Friday Prediction, in March and continued, one hundred words at a
time, for forty-one episodes. One of my aims in this 100 days project
is to complete the illustrations for each episode and publish the tale
in book form. The story can be read in its entirety here.
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