It's Still Life

Part 13, Brigid’s Diary: The Abbey of Saint-Roman

Beaucaire, July 1836, Camouflage

The Beaucaire Fair moved like the Rhône in flood, bodies and bargains braiding into one slow current, and Felreil folding his foreignness into the merchants’ black coats and polished leather while quick fingers rehearsed their small rebellions at the height of a purse.

Poverty showed through the noise like bone through skin: wrists too narrow for cuffs, mouths tightened against hunger that does not consult the calendar.

There were no rooms to be bought, so we climbed into the troglodyte ribs of Saint-Roman Abbey, stone worn down to vertebrae, a shelter so stripped it felt like confession.

A shepherd boy, all dust and tendon, welcomed us to his fire and thin broth as if generosity were muscle memory learned from a different time.

Felreil drew a pamphlet from his coat and, when the boy mistook it for a story, began in that dry cadence of his: “The absolute rights can be reduced to three: security, liberty, property” —and the word rights entered the child’s face like weather, widening it, as though it might mean bread, or a winter that did not return.

While he read, I turned the boy’s hands in mine, cracked skin opening like small red maps, vinegar to sting, thyme to follow, green salve of rosemary and beeswax pressed into linen, and I wondered which of those three rights was meant to cover this child’s hands.

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Previous Instalments – To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link. Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “dust” Images created with Midjourney; all writing is my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.