The Drifter and his Wooden Box

A tale of a man who loved too much and never saw the wolf in the sheep's clothing.

There once was a man who loved too much.  He tied his heart to his sleeve for everyone to share.  There was never a wretch or outcast that wasn’t good enough for his kindness and friendly conversation.  He lived to serve; there was nothing that you could ask of him that was asking too much.  One day as he conversed with an elderly lady in the market, he met eyes with the most enchanting creature.  The old woman said to him, “Son, you look like you’ve seen an Angel.”  He did not reply.  His love walked toward them and stretched her arms around the old woman, and with a voice from the heavens she said, “There you are grandmother, I thought I lost you.”  She then looked at the man and saw how big his heart was.  He looked directly into her eyes and he was forever her slave.  Her name was Constantine.  Her name was Heartless.  The man gave his entire heart to her, and she did with it what she pleased.  She made a habit of forgetting it in different places.  It would stay out in a summer’s day, under the sun, blistered and exhausted, or out in the cold with the lonely moon in the rain and the wet earth.  She would drop it and break it, and crush it and tear it, but still he lay there on the cutting slab.  He loved her too much and she loved him too little.  

The day came where the man awoke and was missing apart of himself, he searched for Constantine and for his barely beating heart.  He turned the town inside out; he even searched every place where a heartless dame would go, but no Constantine.  A week later, he received a knock at his door, it was the Butcher and he was holding something wrapped in cloth.  It was the man’s heart.  The butcher had found it in his discard bin, it was barely intact.  

The once love-filled man was now a shell of himself, filled with bitterness and spite.  He sold everything that he had, because everything reminded him of the miserable harlot that dug his grave.  So with the clothes on his back and his heart in a wooden box, he walked out of his door one night to never return.  He wonders through the dark, never traveling by day, just him, the moon, and the shadow of a dead man.  Some say that they catch a glimpse of him every once in a long while, but they are never sure that it is him until they hear the muffled sound of a broken heart beating ever so weakly against a wooden box.

By Brit Sigh