A Crooked Hook

Fergal Brack was tapping bent hooks straight on the kerb when a whistle came up the avenue, wrong on every note.

Down the kerb the cartwright was racing the last of the daylight to finish a wheel, with no lamp. Fergal knew exactly where that lamp was.

Marta Quillon came behind the whistle, back from the Flex yards, with rust on both sleeves and something wrapped in an old sock.

“You said a straight one,” Marta said, and held it out.

Fergal unwrapped the sock. Inside was a hook bent from an old door hinge, the right size and the right weight, and crooked in three places. The eye leaned left. The shank had a kink halfway down. The curl at the end turned up a little too far.

“They let me bend it myself at the Make-Do Bench,” Marta said. “I do everything a bit wrong, on purpose. That way you always know it’s mine.”

Fergal turned it over in their big hands. Every crook in it was the kind of crook they spend their life tapping out. Four taps would do it. Three, if the iron was kind. Fergal’s hand went to the hammer on the kerb before they even thought about it.

Then Fergal stopped, and ran a thumb along the curl instead, and pressed down hard, as they test every hook on the road. It did not give. It would hold a lamp through any humming night the autumn had left.

Fergal’s throat went tight, and they let it.

They took the folded rag out of their pocket, wrapped the crooked hook in it, and put it back inside their coat, in the place where the good one used to be.

“For the Sedge Posts,” Fergal said.

Marta laughed so hard they had to sit down on the kerb.

Scout came along the avenue just then, writing as they walked, and stopped to see what was funny. Fergal told them. Scout listened to all of it, and looked at the lump in Fergal’s coat, and smiled.

Then Scout opened the notebook and wrote one line, slowly, so Fergal could read it upside down:

Sedge Posts, the first one, when the lamps come back: the hook is crooked on purpose. Leave the crook in.