In the Silent Morning

Flash fiction, 600 words. For IAM's Dec. 27 prompt. Happy New Year! May you all have a happy and healthy 2024!

Dec. 27 IAM image prompt. https://ironage.media/prompt/the-calm.html. Courtesy of Iron Age Media.

One winter morning, every living thing was silent but for the crows. Jeffry startled them when he emerged from the shed, and so they alighted from the church graveyard into the frigid dawn sky.

Jeffry would have liked for them to stay. Lonely was the sexton of this chapel in winter, with none to keep him company but the dead.

He sat on a stone bench under a drooping eave and fixed his broom. It was a bundle of twigs wrapped in twine. The handle he’d been using for thirty years, but the twigs he renewed each week. Old twigs snapped under the stress of ice and snow and stone.

His job that morning, after a light snow, was to brush off the headstones so the memories upon them might be read.

It didn’t matter that the king and his retinue returned to this parish only when the bluebirds flew in limpid sky and rested on burgeoning boughs.

It didn’t matter that Jeffry alone was around to read what was written, the nearest village being eight miles away with a church of its own, and the summer royal residence closed.

Jeffry’s father rested in this hallowed ground, and his mother.

But not his sister. She’d gone missing in the woods just beyond the cemetery’s clearing when just a small child. The village folk surmised the fey were responsible, for in those woods was a clearing with a lone stone arch, and ancient was it. They were always on the lookout for a changeling to emerge from the forest’s shaded line.

Many times he’d studied the quiet woods and wondered. Would she walk out the same age as she’d left, dark-haired and rosy cheeked and decked in otherworldly mysteries? Or would she return as an old woman, exhausted by the trickery and sport of those who hid in the dolmen’s shadow?

The old man Jeffry no longer took the time. Sixty years had taught him that little girls who disappeared into the woods did not emerge. Only fattened wolves did.

But when the position of sexton had opened up – of the king’s own chapel, albeit a country estate, one of several – Jeffry had volunteered, though it meant a cot in the kitchen most nights and a return to the village just one night a week, to rest in his brother’s warm home and attend Mass on Sunday.

Then it was back to the quiet stone and the unsettled crows. And to surreptitious glances toward the line of trees.

When he was done brushing off the stones, he took a shovel and cleared a path. The chapel was made from dark blue stone amassed from local fields, though the keystone was good granite the king’s father had brought with him before Jeffry was born. Jeffry cleared the gutters of ice to protect the stone from runoff. Rivulets like scars cut down the walls to testify to the carelessness of the previous sexton.

Then he heard it, as he only heard it on cold, clear mornings when the world was silent and the crows flown. A song, or was it just the wind? Whistling pure as snow, high as the voice of a young girl. It emerged from the woods and carried over the silent graves.

It reached Jeffry as he carried wood from the shed to the little pile he kept by the kitchen.

He paused and glanced toward the woods. The song – or wind – hit the walls of the church and reflected in a gentler, slower tone, lowing through the gravestones, picking up the many winding courses between them until it was a chorus.

He finished his duties long after the world had once again fallen silent. He then entered the sanctuary and said his prayers for the souls of his mother, father, and sister, confident he was heard.