The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2026. For February, we are delighted to publish a new piece by Glyn Edwards.

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There was once a boy who became a man of sorts, and in those intervening years he shed all his wonder for the wild.

When he received news that his elderly father had died, he travelled back to the farm he was raised upon to discover the breadth of his inheritance, but learned instead his legacy would be wintry fields, hungry cattle and a letter, in palsied handwriting, that ended, ‘what doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.’

That first night he became a farmer, he built such a fire that he felt his bones thaw. His shadow climbed the walls while he slept in the armchair near to the blasting hearth. The next morning he collected the remaining firewood from the lean-to and stoked a blaze that stretched out the whole day. When he recognised his hunger, he looked in vain through the cupboard and store. He led the only calf to the yard and caved its skull with the iron poker in his palm.

Across his fields was another farm, and, when he went to ask for more wood, he found the main house empty. He uncovered a handcart from the orchard, loaded it with cut logs and dragged it until his muscles rang. In the night, he roasted the calf’s foreleg over the fire and savoured how the flames tongued at the dripping fat.

Now, as a boy he had always been called distant rather than quiet, but no one argued how he was prone to silence. And as a man he was sometimes known as resourceful, but always in a way that made people nod knowingly while they said it. In a whole lifetime, he’d seldom obstructed anybody’s days, neither in love nor conflict. Guilt, therefore left but little teeth marks on him as he gathered the fallen willows from the nearby wood after a storm, and Regret bit only with slack jaws when he felled the oaks and chestnuts in the spring. The trees that cupped the wind were gone, and the farm trembled to withstand the winter.

The work with the axe and saw hardened his body and reddened his resolve, while the long hours he had given to clearing the forest past the common all summer sharpened the land’s face. From the bedroom window, in certain lights, he could now see the church’s steeple in the valley below. What had been a golden woodland six months before now was a stubble of trunks that made him drag his hand across his head involuntarily.

Many of the villagers had fallen on hard times, so the man listened closely for stories of those who’d fallen hardest and discovered a widow. He exchanged the last of his father’s herd for her large carriage, together with the horse that held it. He didn’t ask the owner for the horse’s name, nor share his own with the animal.

The horse hauled a grove of birch down the mountainside, and no one in the village raised their voice to object. When the trees were quartered, the man hoisted the rings into his new carriage and stood back to celebrate his endeavour: he saw a vault filled with thick coins, and he thought of all the light that would grow from it. The next morning, he would take it to market but that night, he would build such a fire as to make the chimney rattle. He charred a joint of bloodied beef; he watched the flames lick it clean.

 

That same evening, the farm next door saw the return of its owners. They had happily overspent their seasons helping their children: lambing, caring for newborns, growing intoxicated with life’s newness. Their journey had been a long one but not an arduous one, and, in their dark arrival, their first worries in months stirred like a draft. First, the absence of their cart, and their logpile, then the hay from the barn, and the apples from the press. And quickly they felt the wind tilt the gable ends of their lives. With nothing to feed the horses, or heat the house, the husband walked between the farms and called out to his neighbour.

 

The door opened to a garish glow, the house was oppressively hot. The man at the door had a ruddied, well-fed face and his body bridged the doorway.

‘Can I borrow your cart and some wood to heat the house?’ he said. ‘No. I am afraid the cart is loaded for market tomorrow.’

‘And you’ll not unsettle the cart for a neighbour?’ ‘I’ll not.’

‘Nor offer the loan of a handcart and some logs?’ ‘I’ll not.’

‘Not for the neighbour who remembers you as a boy?’ ‘I’ll not.’

‘Not for the neighbour who looked after your father and your farm in your absence?’ ‘I’ll not.’

‘Will you not spare a single log from the healthy pile by your fire?’ The man turned to the fire, and all that hot light spat out to reach him.

‘I’ll not.’

The neighbour returned home and told his wife a sad tale of a dead farmer, a returned son, and a familiar cart outside someone else’s barn. They talked until the raw morning, when they could see their breath smoking, and see the absence of trees from their orchard, from the further fields, from the forest slopes. And together they saw a plan candled.

 

Beyond the borders of one village was another, and another; the whole valley was mapped in near-identical communities. For decades, on one Sunday each month, the people of every sibling-village arrived in the only market square big enough to house such a gathering. They traded their foods, their wares, their crafts and their tales; of late, the crowds had become meagre, and those that attended traded trouble for woe. Without wood, the people of the valley were numbed and becoming insular: their hopelessness folded in on itself.

There was only a single person selling timber today, and the crowd ached for his attention. The farmer stood inside the carriage, glowing atop the piled wood like an effigy on a bonfire. His skin was as red as summer bark, and voice a rasping saw. If the pestilence that had cleared the forest floor and the wooded slopes was devastating, then this man was something equally impious. He made his demands, and the terms were crueler than the people had feared.

As the first coins found each other in the farmer’s hand, the crowd became aware of a commotion that chimed behind them, and turned, and turned. They had travelled for wood alone, and their days depended on them returning with quartered logs to fill a season, but they stilled and parted to glimpse at the elderly woman and her incredulous claim. She forced herself into the ground and pressed her voice forward.

‘I have discovered how to grow trees in hours,’ she announced. ‘It’s not possible,’ the crowd protested.

‘I am not, my friends, my neighbours. I can show you how to grow a grove as though it were a vegetable plot.’

‘You’re mocking us,’ they claimed.

‘As though logs are seeds, I promise. Quicker in fact. I’ll grow a tree so quickly that it’ll rain wood for each of you right now.’

While his wife talked, the neighbour made his way quietly around the back of the crowd. Careful not to draw any attention to himself, he drew the brim of his hat over face, and stood in the shadow of the farmer’s carriage. ‘It can’t be true,’ he goaded. ‘Wood for free?’

‘Nonsense,’ the farmer answered quietly. Then, quite suddenly, as if fear ignited a copse in his brain, in his tongue, in his lungs, he bellowed, ‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’

The crowd’s attention was blown between the two figures. One whispered hope to their chilled bodies, and one demanded their poverty.

‘Show us then, you fraud, you witch,’ the farmer screamed. He took a log wider than his forearm and threw it down from the trailer. The crowd passed the baton to the woman. ‘Make this grow back into a towering oak,’ he laughed but even those in the crowd who chorused him did so with caution.

The neighbour’s wife struggled to hold the log across her chest and tottered away to a hole she had already dug. The log tumbled into the earth, and she dressed the cavity with grasses and hay from the trampled floor. She was only steps away from the nearest person in the crowd, but so far from the farmer and his carriage that he climbed down from the vehicle, impatiently trying to see the miracle extinguished.

He moved towards the woman, his fingers curling around an axe’s invisible shaft, his shoulders swinging. He would reclaim his log, he would cease the absurd game she was playing, but bodies folded across his route and clutched the neighbour’s wife the way an astonished fist protects a seedling.

‘A tree, a tree!’

‘She’s growing a tree!’ ‘It’s bigger already!’

‘I can see it from here!’ ‘And me…and me!’

Gradually, above the heads of the people that barred his view, the farmer saw the tree’s slender girth rising, and somehow, in what seemed seconds, the trunk thickened and sprang square branches. Though distance made the view difficult, he saw the woman pick thick logs from the tree’s limbs as though they were fruit.

He jostled for his place, but was unable to see the woman fill people’s arms with bolts of wood. Hearing their joy extinguished something in him. He began offering his own logs for a cheaper price, but knew he would be ignored, laughed at even, for who would pay for something that was being given away for free? The more the crowd thinned, the more he felt himself reduced. His hulking frame shrank, his voice was muted once more, and he splintered at the humiliation. He began to curse the woman, and feared he had spent months farming the community’s forests for nothing. He could no longer bear to watch, and hung back, dejected as the woman continued to distribute wood for free.

 

The woman seemed known to him somehow. Familiar. She reminded him of a woman, long ago, who gave him charms to hang at Christmas, and showed him where to see the goshawks’ nests in the canopy. He shook away the memory.

‘Where is your magic tree?’

‘I chopped it apart, and gave it to my neighbours.’ ‘And what have you left of it?’

‘The single bolt of wood.’

‘I want to trade it with you – I have a carriage filled with logs.’

‘What purpose do I have with such a thing – I can grow my own timber.’ ‘Then I will give you my horse.’

‘What purpose do I have with a horse and no cart?’

 

‘Then I will give you the small handcart from my farm.’

‘Then I will give you this magical piece of heartwood in return.’

 

The farmer weighed the wood in his hands. He lifted it to his ear so he could better hear life pulse inside its ringed veins. There was something magical within. The bolt felt heavier than it had before. He’d never held a piece of timber so precious. He marvelled at it until the common was all but clear.

His carriage seemed foreign to him as he approached. It was missing the back axle between the wheels. It struck him suddenly how long and slender such a piece of wood would appear from a distance if it was lifted vertically. The carriage was missing planks that had walled the sides, and he thought how like angular branches they’d look from afar. The carriage was missing every piece of wood he had lined it with, and missing the horse that pulled it. He looked at the log and felt it surge with truth.

He left the skeleton of the carriage in the market ground, and carried the wood back to his farm. He readied to defend himself along the way – to ensure its safety, his safety – though he saw no other person. Without the horse’s hoofs, and the cart’s creaking wheels, he acknowledged the silence. This was a wood without an axe thumping a tree, and it was as barren and muted as if all the animals and birds had left half a century before. Once his footsteps had been forgotten, the sticky terminal buds opened on a sycamore’s shoot and a wren’s trill was met with another. A spider drew a hairline web through a bramble.

At his farm, he dug a hole in the ground where the handcart had rested. He barely acknowledged its absence. The quicker he planted the log, the quicker he would replace all that he had lost. Once the tree grew too tall, he’d move it to a place where he could harvest new wood more easily. The farmer filled the hollow with the excavated soil. For a while, he stood over the earth and felt himself counting. His remaining cow watched him from the half-hung fence.

Later, the farmer covered the soil with leaves, and later with straw. Finally, as the  dark compounded his fatuousness, he kneeled at the site and plunged his hands into the earth. He knew again the voice that had called it heartwood, finally remembering hearing the word as a boy. He did not need to look at the neighbours’ house to know there would be a gentle grey smoking the chimney, and a warm light at the windows. He withdrew the log, carried it inside, and laid it in his father’s hearth. He tried to set it alight but it was wet and refused to thaw. Heartwood, sapwood, pith, bast, bark.

He slept fitfully in his father’s chair, the heartwood refusing to give him comfort. In the darkness, his body blotched black holes, as though he was worm-eaten. And by daybreak, he was farmer no longer, was gone from the farm.