Happy Easter, or not... Something wot I made with AI in memory of my Buddy boy, gone but far from forgotten... ***
Harold’s Lot
Chapter 1
Harold clipped his toenails every spring, whether they needed it or not — though of course they always did. It was rare that he removed his winter socks during those long cold months, and the state of his nails surprised him each time, their length a small betrayal, as though time had been working on him in secret while he slept. He peeled them off in the early weeks of April when the sun decided to bless his life again — one more loop around the solar system under his belt — and he lived in quiet fear of how many loops remained. Mortality, he thought, was much like his toenails: it grew so slowly you didn’t see it happening, but since his retirement to the cob house and his regime of clipping only in springtime, he realised for the first time how quickly time was rushing past and how little of it he probably had left. The sky was blue but the wind still carried a chill left over from winter, a reminder that warmth was a loan and not a gift. The wind chimes sang outside his door. Distant bleating of the wild mountain goats. More distant still, the bark of his nearest neighbour’s dog, miles upwind. The daisies had exploded across the top of the mountain again, bringing their annual rumour that this year would be his year — though he said the same to himself every spring and had done for the last ten, because life had never been the same since she left him. He hoped not for her return but only that he might one day get over the grief enough to feel fit for the company of others again. But while the daisies tried to remind him that hope existed, he had begun to look upon them as liars, each and every one. The daisies, not women. Although he wondered about them too.
It was strange to hear the owl in the morning. Normally it kept its hours, but lately something had changed — it called and called, well past dawn, unanswered, a sound that belonged to darkness finding its way into the light. Harold listened from the doorway. He knew what it wanted. He supposed most living things did, at some hour or another.
Canella came and stood beside him, slower than she used to. She leaned her weight against his calf the way she always had, though now he felt how much of it she was giving him — not affection so much as need. She had arrived at the cob house the winter he could not get out of bed. That was all there was to say about that. A shepherd, the colour of cinnamon, with eyes that forgave him daily for things he had not yet confessed. She was the only creature on the mountain who had chosen to stay.
He looked down at her paws on the stone step. Her nails had grown too.
He would have to do something about that. He would have to do something about a lot of things.
The owl called again. Nothing answered.
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He boiled water in the same blackened pot he had used since the first morning. There had been a time when he counted the mornings. He stopped when the number became unkind.
Coffee. Black. He had run out of sugar sometime in the second year and never saw reason enough to go and get more.
The goats came to the ridge at the same hour they always did. He could set a clock by them if he owned one. Canella watched them from the step, her ears lifting — an old instinct, a shepherd remembering she had once been young enough to give chase. She looked at Harold as if asking permission. He shook his head. She settled her chin back on her paws. They understood each other.
He split wood until his shoulders told him to stop. They told him sooner these days.
Lunch was bread he had baked on Sunday and cheese from the farm at the bottom of the valley — the only transaction that required him to see another face, and even that he managed in as few words as possible. The farmer’s wife had stopped trying to make conversation around the third year. She simply left the cheese on the wall and took his coins from the tin. He appreciated her for that. It was a rare kindness, being left alone by someone who knew you needed it.
The afternoon was for walking. The same trail. The same stones underfoot, worn smoother each year — or were those his boots? Canella ranged ahead, though her range had shortened. The mountain did not change and that was why he loved it. The world below changed constantly and that was why he’d left.
At the lookout point she always stopped and sat, facing the valley, the wind pressing her ears flat against her head. He never knew what she was looking at. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. He sat beside her and for a while neither of them needed to be anything other than what they were.
He ate alone in the evenings, though that was not quite right — Canella lay beneath the table with her spine against his foot, and the owl began its shift outside, and the wind chimes marked the hour in their own language. It was not silence, his life. People would have called it silence but they would have been wrong. It was full of things. Just not people.
He read by candlelight until the words blurred. Always the same few books, their spines broken and pages soft as cloth. He could not remember the last new thing he had read. He could not remember the last new thing at all.
Canella turned three times and lay down by the stove. He bolted the door — against what, he had never been certain — and blew out the candle.
Another loop.
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The days stretched. That was the only way to describe what summer did to the mountain — it pulled the light at both ends until the darkness was just a thin seam between one long brightness and the next.
He stopped lighting the candle. There was no need. He ate his supper in a blue glow that refused to leave and by the time it finally did he was already asleep.
The goats brought their young to the ridge. Small unsteady things, all ribs and nerve. Canella watched them with an intensity she had lost for almost everything else. Something in her remembered lambs.
Harold cut the grass around the cob house with a scythe he sharpened once a week. The sound of the blade pleased him in a way he could not explain to anyone, which suited him fine because there was no one to explain it to. The grass smelled of something close to happiness. He left it at that.
The daisies had held their ground longer than usual this year, but he knew it and they knew it. Their days were numbered. He walked past them without comment, as if out of respect for the elderly and infirm.
His body worked better in the heat. His knees forgave him. His back asked less of him before it gave in. He stacked wood he would not need for months and told himself it was industry, not anxiety — though deep down he knew every log was a prayer against the cold to come.
Canella swam in the stream, or stood in it at least — the current around her legs, her mouth open, drinking and breathing and cooling all at once. At least she still had this. He watched her from the bank and for a moment she looked like the dog that had found him all those years ago, charging through the snow as if she was on a mission from God to save his soul. Which she kinda had.
He did not think about who might have sent her. He had given that kind of thinking up.
The owl went quiet in the summer. Perhaps it had found what it was looking for. Perhaps it had stopped looking. Harold understood both possibilities equally.
The nights were warm enough to leave the door open. He lay on his bed listening to the mountain breathe — the stream, the insects, the wind moving through grass he had cut that morning already growing back. Canella slept on the threshold, half in and half out. Guarding nothing. Guarding everything.
He closed his eyes and for a few weeks the world was almost kind enough.
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The mountain told you autumn had arrived before the calendar did. The light changed first — something in its angle, the way it came at him sideways now instead of from above, as though even the sun could no longer be bothered to climb all the way up.
The grass he cut grew back slower. Then stopped.
Canella felt it before he did. She moved closer to the stove days before he thought to light it. She had always known things he didn’t — weather, strangers, the exact moment bread was done. He trusted her instincts more than his own. He always had.
The goats descended. That was the word for it. Not left, not migrated. They simply walked downhill one morning and did not come back. The mountain was emptying. Everything that had the sense and the legs to leave, did.
He stacked the last of the wood against the eastern wall where the wind hit hardest. There was enough. There was always enough. He had learned the exact arithmetic of a winter alone — how many logs, how much flour, how much cheese. He could survive on less than most people thought possible. That had once been a point of pride. Now it was just a fact.
The daisies were long gone, just short thin stumps to show they were ever there, sharp enough to pierce the sole of your foot if you were ever foolish enough to stand on one. He had only made that mistake once.
Canella no longer walked to the lookout point. She got halfway and stopped, her breathing heavier than the climb deserved. He sat with her where she stopped. The view was not as good but that was not the point.
The owl returned. Whatever it had found in the summer had not lasted.
He knew the feeling.
The first frost came on a Tuesday, though he only knew it was a Tuesday because he had kept a calendar once and the habit of counting sevens had never quite left him. The ground hardened overnight. The stream thinned to a whisper. He bolted the door earlier now — not against what was outside but against what was coming.
Canella turned her three times by the stove. It took her longer than it used to.
He watched her settle and pulled the blanket to his chin and tried not to count anything — not the logs, not the months, not her breaths.
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Winter came the way it always did. Not all at once but in small surrenders — the last bird, the last blade of green, the last morning he could stand outside without his chest tightening against the cold.
He lit the stove and did not let it go out again until spring. If spring came. He had stopped assuming.
Canella slept more. That was the first thing. Then she ate less. Then she stopped meeting him at the door when he came in from the wood pile, and that was the thing that sat him down at the table with his head in his hands because she had met him at that door every single day for eleven years and the absence of her there was louder than any sound the mountain had ever made.
She still turned her three times by the stove. It was the last thing to go.
He carried her outside to do her business when her legs were no longer willing. He did not mind. She had carried him through worse. The snow was thick enough that his boots disappeared into it and he held her like a child, her warmth against his chest, and he could feel how little of her there was now beneath the fur. How had he not noticed. How does anyone not notice.
She went on a Thursday. He knew this because he had started counting the days again, though he could not have said when or why.
She was by the stove. She looked at him and he looked at her and whatever passed between them did not need language and never had. She put her chin on his hand. He did not move it until long after there was any reason to keep it there.
The ground at the lookout point was frozen solid, as he knew it would be. He broke it with a pickaxe, an inch at a time, for the better part of two days. His hands bled and froze and bled again. He did not stop. She had chosen this spot every walk of her life and he would not put her anywhere else.
He laid her down and filled the hole and sat beside it as the light left the valley. The wind pressed his ears flat against his head.
He stayed until he could no longer feel his hands, and then longer than that.
The cob house was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before. This was not the fullness he had described to himself all those years — the stream, the wind, the chimes. This was just silence. The stove ticked. The door stayed bolted. Nobody turned three times on the floor.
He stopped going outside. There was no reason to.
There was a night — he would not remember which — when he walked to the lookout point in the dark and stood at the edge and looked down at nothing. The valley was black and the sky was black and there was no line between them. It would have been easy. That was the terrible thing. Not that it was hard but that it was easy.
He stood there long enough for the cold to make the decision for him. Then he went back inside and put the kettle on.
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Content note: This story touches upon themes including suicidal thoughts and mental health crisis.
If you are in immediate danger or feel unable to stay safe, please contact emergency services right now (for example, 112 in most of Europe) or go to the nearest hospital emergency department.
If you are having suicidal thoughts or feel at risk of harming yourself, please reach out for support. You can:
Contact your local emergency number (for example, 112 in the EU, 999 or 111 in the UK, 911 in the US/Canada).
Call a suicide prevention or crisis helpline in your country (for example, 988 in the US, 116 123 for Samaritans in many European countries, or your national suicide prevention line).
Talk to a trusted person in your life and let them know how you’re feeling.
Contact your doctor, therapist, or local mental health service and ask for urgent support.
If you can, consider saving a few crisis contacts in your phone (emergency number, a trusted friend, and a helpline) so they are easy to reach when things feel overwhelming.
You deserve support, and you do not have to go through this alone.
