GrailHeart presents:
“The Quirky Blacksmith”
The village blacksmith
was a man of steady heat and hand,
with a few quirks no one quite understood.
He spoke little,
but often
muttered to the coals, as if the forge
were an old friend with a temper.
Sometimes he sang to his hammer.
Always the same five note tune,
fragile and a little sad:
He wore one iron boot and one leather one.
No one knew why.
When asked, he'd
only say “Balance!” and go back to work.
Crows followed him to the village.
He never called them,
but he left bits of bread on the windowsill
and smiled when they took it.
He refused to take silver coins.
He said they made the scales lie.
His name was Arren,
and he had the kind of presence that made children
curious and adults uncomfortable.
To some, he was a local legend,
a living charm against misfortune.
To others, he was the village oddity.
Reliable, yes,
but not to be invited to dinner.
When asked a question, he answered it.
When asked for help,
he gave it, though never gently.
He wasn't cruel, just unsanded.
The weaver said he was touched in the head.
The merchant said
he was touched in the hands.
The healer said he was touched by something
the bones remember.
And yet,
when the bridge collapsed
in the spring floods,
it was Arren
who devised a curious brace for the beam
and fitted it beneath
a dozen feet of icy water.
When a child went missing in the mountains,
Arren was the one who searched
through the sleat
through the night, in places
no one else thought to look,
until he found her
half frostbitten beneath a pine tree.
And when the village well ran dry,
Arren built a strange pulley
rig from old iron and driftwood.
And water flowed again.
Though no one quite
understood how it worked.
He never asked for praise.
He never explained the things he did.
He never once tried to smooth his edges.
People came and went in the village.
Some admired him,
some avoided him. Some,
a few, loved him as he was.
One evening,
long after the forge had cooled,
an old friend sat beside him
by the fire and asked, Doesn't it bother you
that half the town thinks you're too much?
And the other half thinks you're not enough?
Arren shrugged.
They're not wrong, he said.
But they're not right either.
He fed a scrap of bread
to a crow that had landed
on the edge of the bench.
I'm not here to please the village.
I'm here to hold the shape I was given
until it's time to return it.
The fire crackled.
The sky grew soft.
The anvil dreamed in silence.
And in the village a child fell asleep,
feeling safe,
not knowing why.