The Bell

The bell-ringer lived in the tower’s shadow.

He had no name, only a rhythm: a life of rises and falls marked by the echo of bronze.

At dawn, he rang the bell. At dusk, he rang it again.

His father had done the same. And his father’s father before him.

No one remembered when it started.

Only that, when it stopped, something would be lost.

He watched the artist from afar.

She sat in the garden beyond the square, wrapped in shawls of violet and smoke, painting strangers into immortality with flicks of her wrist. People gathered around her as if she were a flame in the dark — thinkers, orators, travelers, lovers. They laughed in colors. They praised her skill. They bought her art. No one ever praised the bell.

One afternoon, between tolls, he heard a voice. Not in language, but in feeling — like longing whispered through leaves. It stirred something bitter in him. He followed it, leaving the village gates for the first time in years.

Beyond the trees and ancient brush, he found a clearing where light bent strangely. A plot of soil, deep violet, pulsed faintly in the center. And from its heart extended a porcelain hand.

Beside it stood a figure in foreign garb: long, black leather; a coat stitched from forgotten winters. The Idle Man.

“The plot knows what you desire,” the man said, voice windless. “If you offer the bell’s cord to the hand, it will give you the skill you envy.”

The bell-ringer hesitated. Then nodded.

That night, he climbed the tower, untied the worn hemp rope, and returned to the clearing. He placed it in the waiting porcelain palm. The hand curled closed.

The next morning, the artist overslept. The bell did not ring.

Without the morning toll, the baker missed his kneading. The shepherd let his flock wander too far. The children were late to their lessons. Masons forgot their measurements. Looms sat idle.

The bell had been more than a sound. It was a spine.

As the days slipped by, a hush crept over the village. Visitors stopped arriving. The artist stopped painting. No one knew what time it was anymore — not truly.

And the bell-ringer? He painted.

Brilliantly.

In secret.

As if the hand had gifted him another’s soul.

Still, it wasn’t enough. What he envied had never been talent. It was attention. Adoration. Presence. No amount of pigment could summon what he truly craved.

He returned to the plot, asking for more.

Each time, the hand demanded something small — a brush, a shawl, a breath of laughter.

Soon, the villagers found themselves envying who they used to be.

One coveted her neighbor’s hair.
Another, his brother’s land.
A third, a smile he hadn’t seen in years.

The plot whispered to them, too.

And one by one, they followed.

Until one day, the town square stood quiet. The artist’s easel collapsed. The bakery shuttered. No voices echoed in the courtyard. Only the paintings remained — beautiful, lifeless relics lining the bell-ringer’s home.

At the end, he painted one last piece: a porcelain hand, pale against a field of ruined bells.

No one would ever see it.

The bell tower crumbled, vines swallowing stone. Birds did not nest there. Children did not play.

Yet beneath the village — beneath its roots and bones — the plot waited.
It had rung its own bell.
And it had been heard.

The plot grew thicker.