Welcome to this week’s story, ranging in length from 750 to 1500 words.

With each story we hope to deliver a little whimsy into the lives of our readers.

PUPIL’S SOJOURN

That morning, he did not have much of an appetite, and this worried him. Already two of his classmates had fallen ill with what some whispered was the new plague.

Vacation lay ahead, after all, and he wanted nothing to spoil it.

The school day was almost over, with plenty of summer light remaining. The pupil shifted his weight on the wooden bench, aware of the classroom’s every cough or sniff or sneeze. Likely, the schoolmaster could sense his distractedness—he seemed catch his eye more than usual, and there was a hint of warning in the man’s features.

The pupil sat up and struggled to focus, not wanting to add a whipping to his worries. Yet he was dreadfully tired. Every day at King’s New School began at dawn, yet this one had been particularly long, full of rote memorizations of Latin synonyms. In the Erasmus text, they had memorized over a hundred variations of the phrase Thank you for your letter. The pupil, in fact, loved words: they were play-things, but repetition wore on him. The last two hours of the day, spent largely on Ovid, were those he enjoyed most.

When dismissed, he was the first out the door. Never had the pupil had a more aching desire for solitude. People were infectious. Demanding. Worse, they were asleep. They spoke and they strode through the seasons in a kind of wretched, pitiable slumber, dubious as to their own convictions, wholly self-contradictory, deathly frightened of change. Life to them was unlit, as it was for him. Yet he had no patience waiting for any divine light—some other illumination, he was sure, waited to be discovered.

He descended the steps, passed the guildhall and strode toward the edge of Stratford which opened on that eternal green country where faerie folk clustered in shadow, or the Knight and the Merchant and the Wife of Bath, and all others, made their perpetual way to Canterbury. That was the greatest forging of humankind: the telling of stories. He wondered if any of the beasts or animals told their own stories, in their own ways.

Soon, the pupil soon found himself by his favorite stream, which he imagined was all of Time and that he lay momentarily apart from it, whole and unblemished. He gazed upon the sky, and occasionally murmured under his breath a nursery rhyme his mother had taught him:

“Pillycock, pillycock, sate on a hill…If he’s not gone—he sits there still.”

Something prompted him to sit up, and he wasn’t sure of the source. He detected a kind of humming sound which he could also feel, as if it were passing on the air and through him, a force that knew not the boundaries between the world within and that without.

The pupil felt much like he had that morning, when meeting the schoolmaster’s stern eyes, ensuring he paid attention.

Surveying the birch trees across the stream, he spotted movement. A small figure darted behind the trunk of the tree. A mischievous child, perhaps, hoping not to give itself away.

“Who’s there?” the pupil called.

With growing curiosity, he rose to his feet and made his way to the stream bank. A tingle in his breast hinted at an extraordinary thing: an actual faerie, perhaps, made visible to the naked eye.

After placing his foot on the first stone, in order to cross the stream, the pupil remembered nothing.

***

He woke. His heart raced. Darkness surrounded him, and he was utterly disoriented. Full night had fallen. In the glimmer of the stars, the pupil sensed a kind of faint sympathy.

He stood. He could no longer hear the stream. Night bugs carried on. Trees drank the shadows, and the wind carried unintelligible whispers.

He breathed hard, trembled even harder, and the trembling was difficult to control because he was missing his jacket and the cold found him in more places. The pupil cried for anyone who might hear.

Which direction was home?

How far was he from home?

He yelled—screamed, even, scorching his throat. And before he really understood what he was doing he found himself bounding across this dark meadow, crying out. Tears bubbled in his eyes, streaked his face. He had never known such panic, such bottom-of-the-soul terror.

He ran through the woodland. Branches scraped at him, eager to claim yet another lost child. His shoulder collided with a tree, and pain tore down his arm.

Cresting a hill, he saw a light in the distance and hurried toward it. Approaching, he wondered whether he ought to be more cautious, but still he did not slow his pace and as he drew closer the source of the light resolved itself and he saw it was moving and that it was a wagon, creaking down a dirt path.

The pupil called to them. There was a burst of voices—“Is that a young boy?” was all he heard—and the wagon slid to a stop.

He ran over. “Sirs—!”

The hard-faced wagon driver regarded him with an expression that, in the gloom, could have been contempt or compassion. “Are you all right?”

It was a few seconds before he stammered out a reply. “I am lost. I have forgotten—”

“Get up’ere,” said another voice, this time from within the wagon. This face was kinder-looking, livelier. “Yer lost no longer.”

With the help of several hands, the pupil climbed into the wagon. A cursory glance revealed several men and a stock of masks and crimson hats and liveries and a bundle of posters proclaiming a Mayor’s Play. In their eyes was a lingering afterglow of many personas, many adventures.

“You’re traveling entertainers?” the pupil asked.

“Yes,” said one man with a mustache.

Asked another: “Do you enjoy shows, boy?”

The pupil nodded. Of course, he did. As part of Latin lessons, he had performed in several Terrence and Plautus comedies at school.

“Where do you live?”

“S-Stratford, upon Avon.”

“You’re in luck,” said one man. “Stratford is our next destination.”

Relief washed over him.

“What’s your name?”

He hesitated. Not because he was afraid, but because, for a bizarre second, he could not remember his own name.

“William,” said the pupil.

“William,” said the man, tasting the name. “Where might we find the bailiff of your fine town ahead? Do you know?”

William blinked. “My father is the bailiff.”

Another man checked a document at his disposal. “John Shakespeare, I take it?”

“Yes. On Henley Street.” Mention of his father chilled him. How much during these lost hours had Father’s concern—nay, anger—grown?

The men placed on him a thick wool blanket, itchy but warm enough that he began to feel drowsy. As they carried along the road, Willian could see out one of the openings in the canvas. He watched the night, all its stars, and considered he was touching upon dreamscape when two of the stars moved up and seemed to twirl around one another, as if in a dance, before disappearing rapidly into the farther reaches of the sky.

Against the wagon’s rhythm, he floated in and out of sleep. He had been saved by actors, he thought. Artists. Saved from what, exactly? He could not say. He had been lost in dark wilds, and by their light and guidance he was now being softly ushered back home.

 Doctors, of course, worked on the flesh, the physical stuff of being. But there were deeper things unreachable by the medical knife, things that even religion, with its clumsy instruments, was too afraid to seek out and dissect. And that, perhaps, was the job of the artist. That was the job of the performer and the weaver of letters and tales: to operate in new places, to discover secrets in crude material. Surgery on the soul. Only then could light find it in darkness.

 

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mike Robinson is an award-winning author, screenwriter, and illustrator. His work has been featured on Amazon Audible, as well as in Clarkesworld, Strand Magazine, American Gothic Fantasy, and the forthcoming ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Eco-Fiction. His novel, Walking the Dusk, was a semifinalist in the Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize.

If you enjoyed this story you can find it and more in the Hawthorn & Ash anthology.

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