It's Still Life

Aura – Episode Two (Six Sentence Story)

That Jumper

Päiviö wears the same wool jumper three days a week — hand-knitted from Icelandic sheep wool, lightweight but tough, its complex snowflake pattern running across chest and shoulders, snagging people’s gaze there for a moment before they take an unconscious half-step back …not because he never washes it (which he doesn’t; he only hangs it out on foggy mornings to “breathe,”) but because most of the villagers found him both strangely poetic and, his jumper, possibly a health hazard.

“Must be a national costume; they all wear them, you know, over there — part of the deal when they leave, they bring it with them; their cultural thing or whatever,” said Mr. Cleaver, tipping a sack of kindling into the coal bucket by the pub’s inglenook fireplace.

That evening, someone commented that his jumper “smelled like sheep and fireplace,” and Päiviö, thinking it a compliment, smiled and said “thank you”; and then Morag, in his defence, said he was probably from South somewhere — “They always feel the cold more than Northerners, their blood’s thinner” — and Zofia muttered the word myth, said that blood viscosity was not climate dependent, and then readied herself to go home.

Päiviö never stood too close, not even to friends: he once made a retreat so graceful it seemed rehearsed, backing away mid-conversation from Mr. Cleaver at the hardware store, who later asked if he had garlic on his breath; but the space around Päiviö was custom — a buffer learned in childhood, a respect for air and personal space that the villagers mistook for judgment.

Mr. Cleaver once told Morag that anyone who wears a woolly jumper in mid-July and doesn’t sweat is obviously not English, to which Morag nodded, “… or Scottish.”

I am Aura — the breeze between vowels, and I know how far a person will stretch to reach another, and how far back they’ll lean to stay themselves.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “sack”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.