short story: erin brosey
The Hermit
Somehow, I woke up before the rooster crowed. It was something of a miracle since he tended to call throughout the night before greeting the dim, gray dawn. In the past two years, I still hadn’t gotten used to it, and the extra sleep gave an edge of optimism to the day that at once thrilled me and terrified me.
I lay staring at the wooden ceiling above me, chinked by my own hands. Five years I’d been planning this place, a small wooden cottage, tucked away on a mountainside. Five years I’d researched and saved, searched and diagrammed. It was perfect. It was everything I needed. The cool autumn morning reached my face when I moved to grab my woolen socks from under the covers. I shivered but embraced the briskness, the awakeness, the aliveness the cold always brought me. I rolled out of bed, feet guarded against that raw sensation of living and dressed. As much as I loved the feeling, I preferred to start my day warm.
Necessities attended to, I moved to the kitchen and stoked the coals in the fireplace, adding logs until it crackled. I filled the kettle at the kitchen sink and settled it on the electric stove. Roosters or not, coffee was required.
It was my routine, plain and simple. Wake with the roosters, ponder the cold and its meaning, put on socks and clothes, pee, stoke the fire, make coffee. I stepped outside of my cottage to my front porch and looked out over the trees. Firs and maples and birch and oak and every other tree I hadn’t learned to name yet clung to the rolling stone around me. Tinges of yellow and orange hinted at the corners of fields of green. I sighed into the cup in my hands, contentment and peace filling me. I inhaled the crisp air and the rising, fragrant steam and knew the earlier trepidation was nothing. I had everything I needed.
Coffee finished, I headed out to see the girls. My hens clucked around their coop, tight against hungry predators. I ducked in and spread the feed I’d gathered from the barn on the way. They gobbled it up, and I paused to look at them, taking a seat on a stump. Speckled, buttery brown, mottled white, dusty gray, they were beautiful. Helena, a golden Orpington, pecked curiously at my shoe and looked up at me.
“You, know,” I said to her and she cocked her head, “I have a theory that if anything is perfect, it immediately ceases to exist on this plane because nothing in this world…in this universe is perfect. You, my dear,” I tapped her on her practically perfect beak, “are dangerously close to no longer existing in this dimension.” Helena shook her head, her tiny black eyes considering me, and wandered off to eat with her sisters. I sighed and looked over at the goat pen, my next chore, and said to myself, “While Charlie over there, will exist here indefinitely through pure stubbornness.”
I had thought I was brilliant investing in cashmere goats. It was practically a cash crop, I’d read. Goats have so much personality, I’d heard. Practically take care of themselves, I’d been assured. It wasn’t not true, any of it. Most of the goats were pretty easygoing, even when full of opinions. Charlie, though, made me wish I’d reached nirvana before even dreaming this place up. She was a stubborn old goat, who cowed all other creatures into submission, including me. I’d tried practically everything, including threatening she’d end up on the barbecue someday. She did not care. She was also much less interested in philosophical musings than Helena and became extra grumpy when even the teeniest bit more hungry than usual.
I sighed and stood. When I reached the pen, having fed Herbert, the rooster, along the way, Charlie was front and center, blocking the gate. Of course, she would be blocking the gate. Her horizontal pupil sized me up. The very alien way she looked at me, made me wonder about my earlier statements to Helena. Maybe Charlie came from another dimension. Maybe that’s why she so clearly had no intentions of leaving this one. I summoned my courage and all the goat behaviorism I’d absorbed from the one book I’d read before diving into goat ownership. Offer treats was the tip I was going with. I pulled a bit of uncooked pasta from my pocket and proffered it to the queen goat. Charlie eyed me warily, but tentatively reached her lips toward the morsel and gave it a nibble. Soon it disappeared into the goat’s mouth, and she was asking for more. I sighed in relief and offered her another as I gently pushed in the gate.
More curious noses reached me by the time Charlie was fully preoccupied with her pre-breakfast treat. I loved these creatures in a way I never knew I would. It was completely selfless. If they never produced any wool. If all they did was stand on their heads, I would love them and keep them forever in this dimension or whichever one they had drifted here from.
I meditated through the rhythm of the work, feeding them, turning them out to pasture, mucking the pen and barn, and laying down fresh hay. I leaned on my pitchfork and watched the funny creatures frolic and chew on browning grass. There was nothing that I wanted here, only what I needed. It was here I’d learned to turn the longing inside me into a passive thought or an energy that gathered eggs and trimmed hooves and split wood. That turning wave inside of me had finally settled into a still, deep pond hidden in the trees where the wind could not find it.
A subtle breeze tugged the tendrils of hair that curled around my face. Something else pulled at the edge of my consciousness, a sound that steadily detached itself from the intermittent murmur of wind. It grew until it was tires on gravel maneuvering up the mountain. I stared, confused as a Jeep pulled out of the tree line and into the clearing that was my yard. I waited for the vehicle to turn around and make its way back down the mountain. People didn’t usually get lost this far, but when they did, this was truly the only place to go without literally backing down the mountain. The jeep didn’t turn around, though. It pulled up in front of my cottage and parked. I felt the crease in my forehead get deeper when no one got out. I quickly turned back to the barn to hang up the pitchfork, and strode out, heading straight for the Jeep. Someone was standing on my front porch before I got there.
“Can I help you?” I called out, halfway there. That someone turned around, their hand midway through their hair. My heart stuttered in a way I didn’t know it could anymore.
“Quinn?” He said.
I immediately hated that it was a question.
“Hi, Reid.” I don’t know how I managed to say it, but I did. Maybe I was closer to ascension than I thought.
I stopped about six feet away from him and crossed my arms, waiting.
“Hi,” he said as if that were sufficient.
I said nothing and dropped my arms.
“Do I get a hug? We were best friends, weren’t we?”
I shook my head slowly and waited.
“I uh…I came to offer you a job.” He scratched the back of his neck while he said it, looking at him from an angle. He was already taller than me, but his position on the porch made it even more dramatic.
“Working for you?” I asked.
“It’s a really great startup…” he launched in.
“Reid, I don’t need a job.”
“I know,” he said softly, dropping his hand. “You would be doing me a favor, really.”
“No,” I said evenly, “I’d be giving everything up for you. I tried that once.”
“I know,” he almost whispered.
My heart pounded in my chest, but I took a deep breath, “I need to gather eggs. Do you want to help?”
“Ah, sure,” he said quickly.
I stepped up onto the porch, moving past him as quickly as I could.
“I’ll be right back,” I said closing the door to the house behind me.
I placed my hands on the kitchen table and took deep breaths willing my heart to slow down to the nice steady, un-erratic rate it had been beating at all morning. When it had slowed a little, I scooped the baskets off the rack by the door, worried he would come looking for me if I waited any longer. He had never been in this house, ever. I needed to keep it that way. A hint of longing tugged just above my navel as if it were a string attached to him.
I acknowledged the feeling, released it, and pushed open the door.
He was standing just where I had this morning, looking out over the trees and rolling mountains. The tug pulled again.
“Here,” I said, handing him a basket.
“Over there?” He asked, gesturing to the chicken coop.
“Mmm hmmm,” was all I said.
We walked in silence until we reached the hens.
“Wow.” He said it slowly, making the o extra wide with his mouth.
“They’re pretty perfect, aren’t they?” I said, ducking in and ushering him in behind me.
“I thought you had a theory about perfect,” he said turning to look at me. His eyes seemed to say something I wasn’t ready to hear. As my heart drifted toward him, I pulled it back hard.
“Do you know how to gather eggs?” I asked.
“Ah, I think, maybe?” he hazarded. “I used to help my grandma, but that was a long time ago.”
That made me smile, “Alright old man, it’s pretty easy. Search through the boxes. If there’s a chicken in your way, pick her up and move her. Beatrice over there likes to hide her eggs under the far left box. So, careful not to step in that area, or you could have egg all over your shoes.”
He gave me an indulgent look, “Is that it?”
“Yep,” I said flippantly and dove into the first box.
He reached into the one next to me and pulled out a beautiful blue-green egg, courtesy of Yaba.
“This is what you always wanted, isn’t it,” he said looking at the egg in his hand as if mesmerized.
“It’s what I always needed.” I said the words as if they themselves were eggs, laid gently in a basket.
“I couldn’t give you what you needed.” He said it with a certainty that made that still well inside of me pound like a wave against my heart.
He looked up at me, and what I saw sent all the peace I’d built inside me crashing down.
“No,” I choked out, “but you gave me everything I ever wanted.”
He nodded as if he truly knew why I was on this mountain surrounded by trees and chickens and goats. He placed the egg into his basket and set it on the nesting box. He removed my own from my hand and wrapped his arms around me.
“I don’t know why it took me so long to understand,” he whispered against my temple.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helena peck at his shoe; and I felt this moment was dangerously close to disappearing. Before it could, I turned my head and kissed him.
My want drowned my heart in fire and the yearning inside of me seemed to drag him closer until there was no me on this plane or the next, only we. It was a moment that hung inside me, suspended, like so many others.
Like those others, it couldn’t last. It was the balance between want and need, we’d never learned. That I’d never learned. Instead, I’d erased want from my life, and now, here he was, the very source.
He broke away, his forehead pressed to mine, and whispered, “Come with me.”
“Stay,” I commanded.
He pulled back further, studying my face. I should know by now, how this would go. I should know there is no hope for want and need to be fulfilled side by side. Not for me.
I should know the tempest raging inside of me, only dispenses chaos and destruction, no matter how pure, no matter how giving, no matter what sacrifices are made.
“Okay,” he said, and my heart stopped.
“Okay?” I felt my eyebrows pull together of their own volition.
“Okay,” he said.
All I could think to say was, “Do you want to see my goats?”
He laughed, “You have goats?”
“Yes. You are now in charge of Charlie.”
“Uh oh,” he probably heard the note of relief in my voice I had failed to suppress. “Who is Charlie?”
“The queen goat,” I said simply.
“Hmmmmmm,” he mused and kissed me. The moment ceased to exist.
about the writer: erin brosey
Erin Brosey is a fantasy author and poet living in San Francisco. She is currently working on her first novel. She has several poems self-published on Vocal. Her Instagram has very little to do with writing but does have a dog, a cat, and a lot of sourdough bread.
