THE PIPER

The signs

One week passed. Nothing changed. Except for my dread. It deepened. Became tangible. For, as time passed, I found that it wasn’t just me and Tat. Nearly every family in the village had been visited by the Piper on that one day. And nearly all had received the powder, and all had shown complete improvement.





We all put on a good show. The Piper’s ingenuity was praised. Someone proposed a toast at one town meal, and no one even voiced anything against.





But I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that all was not as it seemed. My best friend, Anne, had noticed it in her elderly grandfather, who had been cured of his horrible coughs by the powder. Len saw it in her Aunt, whose child birthing had been so rough two months ago that she still lay in bed sick – until the powder. Noah told me nervously that his elder, married sister’s scars that she’d gotten from an incident a few months ago had drastically improved – but something was off.





And we weren’t the only ones. Invariably, the Piper had administered the powder on the same day. The powder was used that same day, and it was always adults that it had been used on. And only us children, none older than eighteen, noticed that anything at all was wrong.





And so we feared together. And we did fear. We were children, and something was not right. We did not doubt what we saw.





We were right. We were right . . . if only, if only we were wrong . . .





Unease grew.





More time passed. For it continues to pass . . . no matter that it should have ceased long ago, no matter that lives are torn in two and no matter the sorrow that shakes the ground, it continues. It continues and continues and rips apart love and cruelly twists away hope from the most innocent child. It will never stop, until the world ends, and only God knows that time.





It finally came to a head. It was a few days before Christmas, but there was no joy in the air. Anticipation, but not for presents or Jesus’s birthday. All of us sensed the dread. Our children’s games trickled to a stop, becoming hushed meetings with half-finished fears . . .





Mother was oblivious. Her eyes seemed always darker than they should be, now. It scared me to ever look at her directly, and not just because of the color of her pupils. She was not my Mother anymore. I had tried to stop giving her the powder, but she had taken it herself, disregarding my attempts to get rid of it.





That was not Mother.





It wasn’t just me, either. Waxer no longer tended the candle store, but it wasn’t because of his arthritis. Tat told me he would disappear for hours. He didn’t know where. Nearly the entire adult population was taking the horrible powder, for one curious ailment or the other.





We said that the Piper was working miracles with his powder. Piper’s powder.





But then, he came to collect the payment.