For years, we had listened to my grandfather. Do not go near the mound. Put milk and bread out every night. Wear the bits of iron around our necks. Safety. Thatās what he said it was all for. And of course, we believed him.
When I was ten, my cousin visited. He was from the city, and he laughed when we put out the milk and bread. So we did it for him, in his name. Grandpa would have been proud. We hid iron in my cousins shoes, with a sprig of holly from by the front porch under the left sole so he could never lose his way coming home. We tried so hard.
But then he pushed my sister, called us mean names. He said he wanted the mound people to come. He was 12, he didnāt believe they were strong enough to do anything, he could beat them up. We tried to apologize. We put sugar on the bread to sweeten their minds. They didnāt care.
Our milk was curdled, rotten and stinking in the morning. The bread was black and hard, and my grandfather said the cows wouldnāt milk and all the chickens eggs had had their inners sucked clean. He asked us if we had remembered to do what was right, and we told him that we had. We didnāt tell him what our cousin had done. We didnāt want to get in trouble for letting him say it.
The next morning our cousin was gone. His room was covered with little handprints, little feet on the walls and windowsill. At the bottom of the window was some footprints, but they were much bigger. My grandfather muttered about the leipreachƔn, the brownies, the pixies. He never named the mound folk, but he knew. We all knew that they had taken my cousin.
My grandfather went to the mound later that day. He cut a lock of my sister and mines hair, braiding it round a sprig of holly. He carried an ash staff and an iron knife, old country iron and bronze at his wrists and throat. He took gifts, because you never went to the mound without them.
He was gone for three weeks.
Grandma fed us, always saying he would come home. And he did, with something that he said was my cousin. The were both dirty and bruised, and my grandfather had aged. My cousin said he had snuck out and been lost in the woods, and had been found by our grandfather by the river. He still swears the mound folk arenāt real.
But his eyes are green instead of blue. And at night, he sits on our windowsill and eats bread and milk, singing soft songs while he winks at us, asking us to take off our iron.
areudirty
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