the wick maker

It had been a long day. The market had been out of the weaving string I used to make wicks. It was a strange hobby to enjoy so much, wick making. It was worth it though even if i did not enjoy it to see the kind young lady from town buy them up bundles at a time to make her candles. She was always such a sweet girl.

She always insisted on paying me, but the handmade candle business is one that does not come with much of a profit. I accepted her payment as a loaf of fresh baked bread every week, she lives miles down the road but its always still warm when she gets it here.

It was always quite a sight to see, the young girl coasting down the small hill on her bike a towel draped over the basket containing the bread she had baked that morning, thanking me more than necessary for the wicks that she would put in a candle scented and carved by someone with skill beyond their years.

Today was different though, I would get no bread. I found out in the market that the young candle maker had fallen ill. Thats no problem though I would deliver her wicks instead of waiting for her to pick them up as a gift.

I had spent hours in my workshop already. Weaving the wicks that I would take to the young lady. I don't believe I've ever actually gotten her name, and if I had, I've forgotten it.

What a shame. I never used to forget anything important. I don't recall a time I've forgotten anything actually, but perhaps I've forgotten that too.

The night was no longer young when I decided to stop with the wicks. I had many, ranging in length from small enough for a tea candle to long enough for a candle that one would light at dinner to woo their guests.

I don't remember wooing any of my own guests. Not recently and not long ago. Perhaps I'd forgotten it, and maybe if it was not important enough to remember, I had done a poor job of wooing them.

I don't remember needing to try to impress anyone though. Back in the days when I had worked with my close friend doing tricky business to prevent tricky people from causing harm, I needed to impress no one. Granted there was never time to impress anyone.

It had been him and I, from the start of our young years well into our old ones. We had always been together, but now was different.

He was nowhere anymore. Lost in a cave on some expedition I was too ill to go on with him. He had planned it for months and I didn't have the heart nor the voice to tell him to wait for me. He had gone alone and found himself lost in the dark woods frozen to the ground.

He always was bad at directions, no matter he was he would manage to get lost. He should never have gone alone. I shouldn't have let him.

Sometimes I think if he had a lantern or a light of some kind he would have been able to find a cave or culvert, something to build a fire in and keep the cold out.

But he did not. He got lost in a dark and cold forest, alone for the first time in his life. away from me for the first time in our lives.

I sat thinking in my rather hard chair, it was handmade by the carpenter's son. His first project, it was dreadful but it was practice, and so I used it.

I sat up straighter in my work chair, there always were funny noises in this old place. Somehow though, these felt sinister. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and it felt as if someone was breathing down it.

There was no one behind me, there never is anyone. Paranoia certainly got the best of me in my creaky workshop.

It wasn't much more than a little square of room cut off from the rest of the small building by thin walls done by own hand.

I took the shears I used for cutting bits of weaving string and stood up. Taking a walk through the house, I found no one. I never did find anyone. The paranoia from my old habit never quite left me alone even when I had been out of the game for a time longer than I was in it.

Then again time never did matter to the goons and meat heads we had to get around. It was a tricky habit indeed but we were always better at than we were supposed to be, my old friend and I.

After making a loop around the house, the hairs on my neck did not rest. They stood straight as the line of sky against the sea as if they were trying their hardest to jump from skin.

When I returned to my wick making room, the silence sounded so much louder than the sinister creaks and groans of my previous worry. My weaving string, the best in the county for wick making, was gone. It did not bother me so much that it had been taken. It did bother me though, that I hadn't even smelled the culprit.

This building, too small for more than just me, should not have hidden the bandit. It seems as if the the wick string thief also stole the metal oil baster I had been using for years. I welded it myself to hold the oil I needed to keep my shears working smoothly.

It is so hard to imagine myself and my old friend as good at our previous endeavors as we were. Our reflexes and senses so fine tuned, I often thought it impossible to lose such fine instincts. Especially when I found myself looking for the reason for every creak, and every groan of such an old house.

Sadly though, paranoia and infallible instincts are not the same affliction. I realize that now as the culprit of the previously sinister aches of the wood stands behind me.

his arm around my face covering my nose with his free hand plunging the baster into my neck.

I knew I shouldn't have taken up wick making.

A potter would have been a much safer hobby.