Wrencream

Wrencream is old and he slouches. His lamps are smoking, the light in his window is yellow and unsteady, the roof of his house tilts to the south. Nobody visits him because they think he is dead, or dying. They say he steals children, and sells them to the gypsies. But I know more, I see, I look, I watch. I see old Wrencream going out the back door of his house in the early morning, just before the sun comes up. He drags a wheeled carrier he has made out of scraps of wire and wood making tracks the frost. He usually heads over the frozen fields, through the birches, to the abandoned asylum, to look for things he can sell or recycle. Last week he sold an antique bottle to a tourist for a paltry sum for the tourists, but a huge amount for him, and us.

He is old in my vignette, with a huge mane of hair, shaggily cut. He wears boots, he trudges, his trousers sag. He barely looks around, but he knows if someone is going to throw a rock at him. I can tell, by watching him, that he contains an entirely separate thing within his own head. He is quietly possessed by something, but with what, what? What makes him so quiet? So subtlety knowing? You might say in him is a distinctly separate World, or Universe. But not just any imaginary place. I suspect there is an exceedingly rare Universe in his head. As if God created one privately, a better one, a purer one. He plays odd, high music in the night, presumably on a fiddle.