---

---

The chimney sweep’s bicycle was manufactured in 1902. It was the premiere model of its era, dubbed The Rabbit because of its swiftness and high, wide handlebars. It was among the first bicycles in the world to feature a gear shift and vulcanized rubber tires half a meter in diameter. It was also an unlucky contraption that brought nothing but despair to its owners. All of the bicycles from that era, the chimney sweep’s included, were manufactured in a Croatian factory north of Dalmatia and west of Split, in a seaside village named Trogir.

The bicycles were made at the request of Franz Ferdinand, Austro-Hungarian Emperor and avid cyclist. In fact, the unlucky 1902 model was his favorite and he owned six of them. He decreed that the bicycles be distributed around the Empire to mail carriers in the Postal Service. He reasoned correctly that they were cheaper and more efficient than horses.

One Rabbit was stolen from its owner—a prefect judge’s Serbian retainer named Gabriel Csusco. Ruffians on the Vlasnyet Bridge, on the outskirts of Belgrade, bludgeoned the unfortunate retainer over the head and threw him in the river late one winter. These men—young anarchists, mostly, though one documented homosexual was among them— were later apprehended for the crime after one of them, in the middle of the day, apparently forgetful as to how he had acquired the bicycle, used it so that he wouldn’t be late paying a fine at the court house. The policemen standing outside the courthouse said later that they were astounded by several facts: firstly, that a documented anarchist would pay a fine at all, and secondly that he tried to park his bicycle in the prefect judge’s retainer’s space with the livery still intact. 

The band of anarchists and the homosexual were captured, and the bicycle was held as evidence. That would have been the end of its story except that a corrupt policeman sold it to a mail carrier whose own bicycle had been lost in a card game and who needed a replacement before his superiors discovered it. The mail carrier was a German immigrant named Von Kleist. He was a self-indulgent man, overweight and asthmatic, and since the switch from horses to bicycles, delivering the mail had become a life-threatening chore. In a stroke of brilliance he devised a system of delivering the mail that worked out well for everyone along his route: he left all the mail he was given either at the church or the tavern. Nobody ever complained. Attendance at both increased. All parties concerned were happy. People picked up their post when they felt like it.

Von Kleist died in his mistress’ bed the next spring with a bag of mail resting at their feet. The distraught woman reported it to the police and for months afterward citizens were coming to her cottage looking for letters or packages from abroad. When the post had finally all been collected and the woman left in peace, she breathed a sigh of relief and immediately took up with a married brick maker.  Due to a bureaucratic mishap, the empire never came to collect Von Kleist’s belongings, and the bicycle was left unclaimed, on its side, in front of the woman’s cottage. Then the First World War erupted and Von Kleist’s mistress’s home was set ablaze by a band of roving Slovenians. The bicycle was buried in shingles from the unlucky woman’s collapsed roof.

Long after the war the bicycle was discovered by a group of gypsy children who took it back to their father—a tinker of some renown. He fixed the old bicycle, but before his children could learn to ride it, the Second World War erupted and the entire family was taken away by German soldiers who confiscated the bicycle and presented it to the children of a well-connected family in Budapest.

Sufficed to say, the children in that well-connected family all drowned in the Danube when a retreating German army shot holes in the family’s pontoon to slow down the British who were arriving via river patrol. Afterward, the distraught parents offered the bicycle to a chimney sweep who, when tearfully told of its history, remarked: “Well, I’m looking for something durable. If it can survive all that, it was surely built to last.”

Quite a few years later, an accident in an asbestos factory rendered the chimney sweep blind. He passed the bicycle on to his young apprentice.

The young apprentice and the chimney sweep were together for five years. They left Budapest and went into the countryside. They crisscrossed the land traveling from village to village. For three weeks during the holidays, the young apprentice visited his mother. Over the years, however, his severity developed into a full-blown melancholia. He was bilious to the point of belligerence. When the chimney sweep went blind and soon after died, he left the adolescent his small cottage and all his belongings. The young man collected his mother and moved her there. He visited her more often after that, but by the time he was thirty, his ennui was full-blown and he set fire to the house, sold the land, and put his mother in a rest home.

“Funny,” she said one morning at the rest home when he had come to pay her an infrequent visit. She was looking out the window as they breakfasted together on toast and jam, “You were always so short. It’s really marvelous that you became a chimney sweep. Don’t you agree?”

The chimney sweep cursed and threw the butter dish at her. Knowing him like she did, the old woman had only portioned out a few tablespoons. The rest of the butter was safe in the icebox.

“I meant it as a compliment. You have a profession. Little Tibi’s mother is heartbroken over him. He’s in jail, you know.”

“Little Tibi is irrelevant, Mother,” the chimney sweep said as he put out his cigarette in the jam.

“Oh! That’s not true. He was such a nice boy. He brought his mother flowers all the time. He even sends her paper flowers from jail. He’s thoughtful like that.”

“Mother, Tibi, his flowers, you and me, we are completely irrelevant in the grand design of things. Irrelevant, even to the lives of our fellow men. If I die cleaning a chimney tomorrow, a Chinaman in Peking won’t make the slightest shudder. Not even a fart for me having lived.”

The chimney sweep’s mother clucked at him, and then her eyes grew wide.

“You’ve seen a Chinaman?” she said. “What was he like? Did you clean his chimney?”

The chimney sweep moaned.

“No, mother. I haven’t. I’m saying that you and me are irrelevant. I couldn’t care less about little Tibi, his paper flowers, his mother, or you or me, for that matter.”

“I saw Arabs once,” his mother replied. “Or maybe they were Negroes.”

“Mother, do you hear me?”

“At the Western Train Station in Budapest. I was a young girl. It was 1923. I’ll never forget it. They were sitting together and eating soup in a restaurant. They seemed so normal. Everyone stopped to stare. When they finished and wiped their mouths, we applauded.”

“Mother, we are irrelevant.”

“They seemed happy too. They smiled at us. They were very charming. One of them was carrying a trumpet. I do remember that.”

“I don’t care about the Arabs, mother.”

“Negroes. I’m certain now that they were Negroes.”

The chimney sweep flicked his cigarette butt at her. It landed on her macramé.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “You’ve ruined it!”

“Well at least I’m capable of something,” the chimney sweep muttered.

The woman looked in his direction. She put on her eyeglasses. She shook her head.

“I should have had a Negro son.”

“What?”

“I’m certain a Negro son would never ruin his mother’s macramé. Oh, but you should have seen how nicely they had their soup.”

*

The young apprentice, now a middle-aged man nearing sixty, his mother long dead, and he, resigned to his fate, arrived in the village of Zivatar astride his Rabbit. It was his most useful tool, and save for a dent on the rear fender where he had kicked it one day in an angry outburst, it was unblemished. He no longer remembered what he had been angry about the day he kicked it, but it didn’t really matter as he was so often angry. Mostly, though, he tended to his bicycle carefully and kept it in superb condition. He kept the chain oiled and tightened, and he replaced it whenever he spotted flecks of rust in the eyelets. He cleaned dirt from around the wheel spokes regularly. He replaced the brake pads every four months. He always carried inner tubes and a pump, and if he noticed a slow leak he had no qualms about stopping wherever he was, even if it was on the side of a busy highway, and patching the tire straight away.

The chimney sweep traveled on it six months out of the year—always during springtime when people opened their windows and cleaned out the winter. He was unaware that something in its manufacturing had made it unlucky. He was not the type to have believed that anyway.

*

When the chimney sweep crested the hill outside of Zivatar and looked below, he was startled by the size of the village spread out in front of him. He looked for some kind of road sign. He looked at his maps. There was nothing to tell him where he was. He looked again at the village. It was no small affair, a hamlet of close to 5,000 souls. That men chose to take root so deep in the prairie always surprised him. Why not head for big cities and warmer climes. The chimney sweep decided it was laziness. The masses were lazy and comfortable. All he could do was service them where they were.

The chimney sweep headed toward the Centrum in the distance, toward the church with its onion domes. He rode past the potter’s workshop and past Ibolya’s Tavern. He saw the sign, made note of the strange looking tavern, fully intending to return to it, but for the moment he was intent on reaching the Centrum, which he gauged as being about two kilometers further. He looked at the tops of chimneys as he headed toward it. They were black with soot. He shook his head. A chimney sweep had not passed through here for several years, at least.

“A gold mine,” he whispered, “I could make a fortune here.” And for the first time in months his face cracked into a smile.

*

Children and their small dogs took note of the stranger and began following him. It was the same story in every village throughout the countryside. Children would see him, scream, and then come running out of their forts or empty lots to greet him.  He always thought of the old chimney sweep who had trained him and of what the man had told him early on: “People, not all of them, but most of them, enough to make it annoying, believe that touching us, or getting us to touch them, means good luck is guaranteed to come their way. In some of the more remote villages even gazing upon us is considered a good omen; and if they can follow up the gaze by looking at a broken pane of glass then they feel like they are doubly blessed.”

“Is it true?” he had asked.

“It is true for everyone but a chimney sweep. For us it’s a load of pig shit. Still, it’s best to give the people what they want. They’ll pay you handsomely for a smile and a pat on the back. You should smile more. Try to lighten up.”

*

For his part, the chimney sweep didn’t pay much attention to that bit of advice. In fact, he wasn’t above spitting at children or kicking dogs to keep them at bay. He considered it an obligation, really. What, with them running so wildly and indefatigably through the streets, if he didn’t spit at them, or kick them for their own good, they could be run over by a milk truck. And how sad would that be? It would be terribly sad, really.    

“Damn mutts,” he grumbled as he looked at a young child.

The child waved at him. The chimney sweep smirked back and looked instead at the brick cottages that had been standing for a century and a half. They had been updated over time, mostly with stucco cinderblock attachments connected to the old brick of the main cottages. The roads in the village were devoid of too many cars and they were cobbled. Had he been a romantic man he might have enjoyed this quaintness, but he wasn’t. Cobblestone streets would wreak havoc on his wheels. Cobblestone streets would jar his head and rattle his teeth. The day would end in a headache for certain.

“Primitives,” he mumbled to himself, trying not to shake too much and bend his rims. “Might as well be apes. Probably inbred.”

          He was pleased that he had spotted the smoke, though. He always headed toward smoke, and he instantly recognized the blue wisps curling into the sky as hearth smoke.

*

He wondered if the people in this village would be easy to fleece or not. He assumed they would, but as a test, the chimney sweep stopped and walked up to a cottage at random. The shutters were freshly painted, as were the cement stairs that led to the door. He stood outside the gate and rapped against it until dogs inside the house began to bark. A woman opened her door and looked down at him. It took her a moment to recognize his uniform, but once she spotted the leather blazer and his moustache she screamed and smiled at him. She called to someone behind her.

“Bela, come quickly, a chimney sweep!”

She shooed the dogs away and ran down her steps. She opened the wooden gate and pulled him in. The chimney sweep loved these isolated country women. Bored and shut-in, it didn’t take much effort on his part to talk them into anything. When she approached him he didn’t smile, but he looked her dead on with lascivious eyes. He nodded at her and let her pet his shoulder.

“Good day! Does your chimney need cleaning, Miss?” he asked, knowing full well that it did.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course it does. It’s been ages.”

“Well, my fee is five-thousand forints,” the chimney sweep answered. He was gauging her reaction, but she didn’t blink. She nodded and straightened her dress. She was primping.

“Of course, of course,” she said, fondling the lapel on his blazer. “As much as you want.”

The chimney sweep wasn’t shocked too often, and he hadn’t planned on beginning work so soon, but since she had accepted this exorbitant price, he felt he should get to work quickly before she changed her mind. He unfastened an array of bristles and brushes from his bicycle and carried them in one hand, while in the other he held a telescopic pole. He followed her inside and approached her hearth. He attached a thick brush to the pole, stepped into her hearth and into the chimney, extended the pole, and began to scrub. All the while he worked, he couldn’t believe that she would actually pay him once he was through. However, when he was done, she walked up to him, put her arms around him in a great loving hug—which he returned—and handed him two crisp five-thousand forint notes.

“Take this,” she said, looking in his eyes. “A little extra. I insist.”

The chimney sweep took the money and put it in his satchel. He tipped his hat to her, and despite himself, instead of the slight mischievous grin he usually gave country wives, he smiled broadly back. She walked him to the gate leaning on his shoulder and then to a neighbor’s house. Her silent husband patted him on the back as he left. The chimney sweep had noticed that the man’s eyes were flickering in anger, but the husband didn’t flinch or say a word when the chimney sweep walked out of his home ten-thousand forints the richer and with his wife draped on his shoulder. The chimney sweep felt those flickering eyes burning into his back, though. Like two embers thrown down his shirt. He shrugged it off. Poor bastard, he thought.

“Eva.” The woman escorting him called out. “Come out. A chimney sweep is here.”

Another woman looked through a window and waved. She hurried out of the house and cooed at him. The women chatted excitedly for a moment and he was handed off. They bade farewell to one another and then the new woman led him into her home. When they were inside, as the woman rubbed his shoulders, the chimney sweep looked her in the eye.

“My fee is ten-thousand forints.” He said it, but he didn’t mean it; and he was ready to bolt, fully expecting that she would scream and call the police. But the woman named Eva only smiled at him. She shook her head.

“Hmmm,” she said, still rubbing his shoulders. “That’s a bit much. Let me see what my husband has in his safe.”

She squeezed him, let go, and disappeared from the room, though not before handing him a small tumbler of brandy and pointing to the hearth.

By the time he was finished with this second hearth, he had been in Zivatar half a day and he was besotted and sweaty. When he wiped the grime from around his eyes, he was startled to see the woman hovering next to him and holding a fresh, moistened towel in her hand. He took the towel from her.

“I’m done,” he said. “Do you have my fee?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Here it is.”

Two more five-thousand forint notes. They were as crisp as autumn leaves, as pink as a fish’s belly. Again, the chimney sweep forgot about his grin and was beaming now. When she gave him one final hug, he pressed against her and lingered. In four hours he had made twenty-thousand forints. Three days wages in any other village.

“Tell me,” he said, still holding onto her. “When was the last time a chimney sweep came through here? Isn’t there one living in the village, or nearby?”

The woman shook her head, remembered herself, and pulled away.

“Wouldn’t that be nice? A chimney sweep in the village.” She was fidgeting now. Straightening her hair and dress. She couldn’t look at him. How he loved these country women! “The last one came through three years ago. Chimney sweeps just pass us by. I guess they figure we’re poor and not worth the trouble.”

This led the chimney sweep to his next question. “I thought I saw a train station.”

The woman nodded. She handed him another brandy and poured a second glass for herself. Expensive plum brandy this time.

“Yes, that’s right, but we don’t have the train yet. Soon. It’s the mayor’s pet project. They’re almost done, in fact. It won’t be a big one. A lot of the younger men in the village are working on it. It’ll be a major employer. The mayor says that we’re going to get one of those little rail cars, you know, those little bitty trains. Just the one car. A little intercity. An inter-bitty.” She giggled here and looked at her glass. She poured more brandy and continued. “Then we’ll really be connected to the rest of the country. We won’t be so hard for the investors to reach.”

“What investors?” the chimney sweep asked.

“Germans, I guess, or maybe the British, or maybe even Americans. Wouldn’t that be something? The mayor’s been showing Asians around the past few months. He’s expecting more.”

The chimney sweep scoffed.

“What would they want here?”

The woman shrugged. “You’d have to ask the mayor. He says we have good soil and the perfect workforce for a factory.”

“What kind of factory?”

“You’d have to ask the mayor.”

“And what do people think of the foreigners and the train station?” the chimney sweep laughed.

“I don’t know,” the woman answered. “It’s okay, I guess. It’s good for us. We’ve been left behind for too long. Things will pick up. I’m okay with it, anyway.”

“What is the name of this town? Zivatar? I saw a sign on the tavern, but nothing anywhere else.”

She looked at him a moment.  “My, you really are lost. Yes, that’s right. This is Zivatar. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”

He shook his head.

She looked disappointed, but she shrugged and smiled.

“See? The mayor’s right. That’s why we need the train. Charming chimney sweeps like you could come whenever they wanted. You could walk right up to those nasty little women at rail stations around the country and buy a round trip ticket to Zivatar, one of the only villages in this country to have never been sacked. We’re one of the only towns in Hungary never to have fallen under foreign influence. The village has always been like this, exactly like this. What do you think of our cobblestones? You should really go and see the Centrum while you’re here. Market Square has some wonderful craft stores. Everything is handmade. The church is 900 years old. You saw it on the main road, yes? It’s also one of the oldest in the country. The bells had to be repaired in the fifties I think, but other than that, it’s all the original masonry. Even the wooden floors have petrified with age.”

The chimney sweep frowned and began to gather his things.

“Whatever,” he said.

“When the Turks attacked, they marched right past us, knowing we were here, but thinking we weren’t worth the trouble. They sent a few men and the domes were erected on the church. You can read about that there,” the woman continued, not listening to him. “The Austrians didn’t bother us either. I doubt if the Hapsburgs ever heard of us. The Germans heard of us, but like the Turks, they never came looking. Even British tanks rolled by. My parents stood on the crest of the hill out of town and watched them on the horizon. They never came any closer than the horizon. Can you believe it? Not even the Russians cared enough to visit. For three days the tanks came in from Russia. The tanks came for three days, most of them heading for Budapest. Did they ever stop here? No. I was a toddler then. The whole village went out and watched them lumber past. They sent The Party, though. Party officials came. They were Hungarians. But it just never worked out. It never took. Most of the officials, after realizing that their superiors had forgotten them as soon as they reached here, just married and settled down. They became part of the village. Looking at it, I suppose we should be thankful that we’re just too much trouble to reach.”

The chimney sweep shook his head in disbelief.

“I arrived here on a bicycle.”

The woman laughed and stroked his shoulders. She was good and drunk. She grabbed his collar.

“Yes, that’s right! You certainly did. You must have really wanted to come,” she said.

The chimney sweep stepped away from the woman who was now beginning to paw him with gusto.

“Wait? How did the church bells break? A bomb? Surely the bombardiers must have seen the village from the sky. Was it the Americans? Was it the British? They would have bombed any population center they saw.”

The woman laughed and stroked his hair.    

“My, my, but what a wild imagination you have. No, we’ve never been bombed. We’re just lucky. Maybe there was a cloud that day. Who knows? No, an angry girl climbed up the belfry and set fire to the ropes that held the bells in place.”

“How’s that?” the chimney sweep asked. “During the middle of a war?”

“But I told you, there was no war here. No wars. No revolutions. No counterrevolutions. Just us. The way it’s always been. Uneventful. Maybe after the station is finished things will pick up. We could use a little picking up.”

The chimney sweep shook his head. He thought about the twenty-thousand forints in his pocket. He certainly wasn’t upset that he had left the main road and stumbled onto this place. He gathered the rest of his belongings and thanked the woman for the drinks.

“That tavern on the edge of town, is there lodging there?” he asked.

“I suppose Ibolya could arrange something for you,” she replied, and her voice was clipped now. He had rebuffed all her advances. “She’s a bit wild, though, and her tavern isn’t really a place for gentlemen.”

“Ha,” the chimney sweep laughed, and then he bade the woman goodbye, turned and walked out. She followed him to her gate and tugged on his jacket, but he broke free, and she could only wave as he pedaled away, back toward the crest of the hill, toward the main road. He didn’t look at her again.

Something had crossed the chimney sweep’s mind as he left. In fact, he was thinking about what it would mean if he were to stay for a while. He was getting older and knew he should be thinking about his retirement. The new system had left him almost completely on his own. He knew he shouldn’t expect any kind of retirement worth a damn from the state. In fact, with inflation in the high digits, he knew his money could lose value on a walk to the market. Capitalism was killing him. Maybe he could settle down here and find a simple country woman, he thought. Maybe that was the answer: a woman of means in a cheap town. An easygoing spinster that wouldn’t care if he caroused, that would be glad to have him around. The villagers might appreciate him staying as well, and if he were to stay, if he were to go from cottage to cottage, repairing and cleaning out chimneys and hearths, as the only chimney sweep, he might even make a handsome fortune. It would be a comfortable retirement, at least. And all he needed to fulfill the dream was a woman of means.

The chimney sweep scratched his head and sneered. It was too easy. A perfect ending for him. Like falling off a cliff and landing in a tub of butter. He’d begin hunting for that special country maiden at once.

“Zivatar.” He looked overhead. “No clouds in the sky today.”

He arrived at Ibolya’s tavern and rested his bicycle against a tree. Then he skulked into the bar, not wanting to speak with anyone, not wanting to have to explain himself, and not wanting to be touched. He found a table in a corner that looked like it had been fashioned out of an old door. He sat on a small barrel that served as a stool. The barrel was cushioned, but the cushion was tattered. He picked at the stuffing and waited for a waitress. When he realized that one would never come, he got up, walked over to the bar, and ordered several drinks from the bartender. He hoped the bartender wouldn’t say anything, and she didn’t; she didn’t look at him. She was busy with her other patrons, moderating a discussion that only locals would find interesting. The peasants seemed to be in a tizzy of some sort. The chimney sweep was only half listening, but he gathered that there was a commotion in the village. A love scandal. They seemed to be cursing someone. The chimney sweep noted that the bartender was the loudest.

He carried three bottles of beer back to his table himself. He drank the first two quickly, and then nursed the third. He could tell that most of the men in the pub were farmers, though why they weren’t working their fields, he couldn’t say. He remembered that the winter had been especially cold. Most of the spring so far had been dry. The rivers were low; the canals were low. Irrigation was surely a problem. Sunflowers—the chimney sweep figured it must have been sunflowers—needed moist soil. They sucked nutrients right out of the earth. He knew the story. He’d heard it a million times, in fact. Whenever they rubbed his shoulders and begged. The poor peasants had probably hocked everything to buy extra seeds, hoping to press some of their harvest into oil, sell some to the food companies, or hold onto the remainder for next year’s planting.

Of course, because of the warm weather, the sunflowers would dry up. The banks, or loan shark, or whoever they borrowed the money from would hound them, throw them off of their farms, beat them with sticks, or auction off their land. It was the same story in every other remote village in the country, the chimney sweep thought. Little country farmers were losing their shirts to bigger operations. He just couldn’t understand why people never learned.

He looked at a large, broken-backed man sitting at the table next to his, saw the dirt under his fingernails—the sign of a man scraping a few measly coins from the mud. In a moment that was rare to the chimney sweep, probably because of the money in his pocket, probably because he figured that these people might soon be his neighbors, he handed his beer bottle to the man.

“Your fields all dried up, are they?” the chimney sweep asked, trying to sound sympathetic.

The red-haired man named Ferenc looked up, his eyes watery, his nose swollen and pink. He took the beer and took a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He shook his head.

“Thanks. I was thirsty.”

“Don’t feel bad, friend,” the chimney sweep said. “Things will turn out for the best. Sell out and move on. That’s my advice. I knew a peasant who lost everything, went to Sekesfehervaros and met a rich German. He’s doing well now, bottling soft drinks. Making a killing on orange soda. Things can only get better.”

The man looked at him and shook his head.

“I’m sorry. What are you talking about?”

The chimney sweep was startled. He looked at the man again with raised eyebrows.

“Your fields. Isn’t that your trouble?”

“My fields.” The man shouted it so that everyone in the pub stopped what they were doing and looked at them. “What’s the matter with my fields? I just checked them a few days ago. Did you see something?”

The chimney sweep shrugged.

“I thought maybe with the lack of rain that your crops were in trouble.”

The man shook his head.

“What are you talking about? I paid a lot of money for a new drip irrigation system. My fields are fine. I’m expecting a bumper crop. I’ve even worked it out with the mayor to get most of the produce sent off to Austria.”

“Sunflower seeds?”

The man shook his head. “Beets.”

“Beets?”

“I’m going to do the best I have in years. Sugar beets.”

The chimney sweep reached over the table and snatched his beer back. “Give me that,” he barked.

The peasant shouted and jumped up. His chair was already hoisted in his hands.

“No fighting in my pub, Ferenc,” Ibolya said. “I’ll throw you out.”

She gave the command while she poured a drink. Her back was turned to them. The farmers looked at the chimney sweep. Some recognized him right away. It took Ferenc a moment, but finally he recognized the chimney sweep as well and put the chair down. He walked away, but not before patting the chimney sweep on the shoulder and begging his pardon. He walked to the other side of the bar and sat down at a table with three rough looking men.  From time to time the men looked over at the chimney sweep. The chimney sweep, tired from a day of riding and cleaning, and wanting to get an early start in the morning, finished his beer as quickly as he could and left. He didn’t bother asking the bartender for a place to sleep. Instead, he found a spot further up the hill, at the potter’s workshop. He walked over to the workshop and stuck his head in. The potter and his apprentice were working at their tables.

“Hello,” the chimney sweep entered. “I was wondering if you’d mind me sleeping out front there. I just rode in and thought I might sleep under the poplars.”

The potter and his apprentice looked at him, recognized his outfit, and invited him in.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the potter said. “You can sleep here. There’s plenty of room.”

“Thank you, no,” said the chimney sweep. “It’s warm out and I have bedding. I’ll be fine outside. I just wanted to let you know. Perhaps I’ll start a campfire. I wouldn’t want you calling the police.”

“Feel free. Feel free,” said the potter.

The chimney sweep nodded and left.

The potter was smiling.

“That’s a good sign,” he said to his assistant. “An afternoon miracle. My boy, I think our luck is about to change.”

The chimney sweep hid his bicycle underneath some brush by the side of the road and rested against a tree. He lit a campfire and spent the rest of the day and night dozing there. He was dreaming of his new life, of his country woman, of his pocketful of money.

© 2009 Marc Fitten