It was a balmy spring day on the edge of the Thames, and as dusk drew closer and the sun swelled orange, the mudlarks started to sing as they wound down their pinickity picking with their beaks. The mudlarks were quite a menace to the other scavenging folk, including Edward the old Rag-and-Bone man.
Edward liked to take to the muddied shores of the river to promenade where he wouldn’t be stared at in disdain. After a long day of filling his bag with endless bones and rags, and avoiding the glares that told him they’d wish he’d disappear, the beach was a place where he would saunter and view the city in all it’s glory from a distance. The city may have renounced him, but Edward doth’d his cap to its splendour every evening from the beach, just as the sun would begin to set.
When it was dry on the beach, he would merrily strut, and when it was wet underneath, he would heavily trudge, and on a day like today, a day between but all the same, he would glide through the sludge and become himself again. He’d place his sack upon the shore, and would hold his head up high towards to sun so that the mud would harden and crack across his cheeks.
But the menacing mudlarks just couldn’t resist, as they shrieked and cackled in joyful bliss, and bathed in the glorious mud as they hatched a plan, one that was both good and bad in the making. One by one, they began to swoop down, and grab a tuft of hair from Edward’s matted crown, and then peck between his rags that hung from his jutting bones, which poked through his paper thin skin. The muddied birds as they larked around, decided to take this Rag-and-Bone man apart, and feast upon his tired and withered heart, and let him roam the city betwixt the realms that were. He could now be a gentleman that promenaded on the sand, no longer just bones in ragged old rags, but a version of himself that became before and after, his life in the town on the edge of the Thames.
Fin.