Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw the monks over there wandering around in slow motion in their bee outfits.
Summer evenings Ruckert would sit out on his porch drinking beer and watching fireflies drifting around out in his pasture. On many such evenings the monks would throw open their doors and windows and the sound of their singing would travel for great distances in the countryside.
Tormented as he routinely was in those days, the singing of the monks experienced in this manner never failed to give Ruckert a warm burst of uncommon pleasure.
The autumn changing of his storm windows was always a harbinger of Ruckert’s annual onslaught of severe melancholy. He knew that from that day forward, until traditionally the first warm day of spring, he would be locked away from the music of the monks and their languid dance with the bees.
On very rare occasions in the dead of winter, however, Ruckert would hear the faint murmur of the singing monks as he dashed back and forth from his car in the driveway.
In the almost ten years he had lived across the pasture from the monks, Ruckert had never exchanged so much as a word with a single one of them, even as he lived with the constant fear that one of them would someday escape from the monastery and show up at his door seeking asylum.
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