Winner

And then there was Lar Ennis, the young man who won the best joke competition at the fairy fair. Oh the fay, they were in stitches, and how they poured favour and promise upon him. But of course, when their night revel gave at last to the glare of morning, they fell shy and truculent.

Their mirth and their feasting had blinded them. Or so they excused themselves.

When Lar left his house after a long sleep, the blue sky grew a thick grey and the rain began. He trudged into the fields and discovered that his mare had tried to jump the fence during the night, and had staked herself, and was beyond repair.

In the town it was no better. He greeted the men in the market square with warmth, but found only sullen faces and token murmurs. Shop doors closed as he approached them.

The rain poured down.

When Lar reached home and complained of the weather, his wife looked confused. It had been fine, she informed him, from the moment he left the house. The following day the roof blew off their barn.

The week after that his wife took up with a stable-hand from Tullow; and Lar found rats in the larder that seemed to have no fear of him.

Within a year he was walking the roads and within five years he had lost an arm to gangrene and an eye to misadventure – an unfortunate incident involving a garden rake and a pack of wild dogs.

Twenty years were passed, since the fateful day of the fairy fair, when through the dappled shade of a high, bright sun, Lar trudged into a clearing in Cregal Woods and upon a gathering of the fair folk.

He fell to his knees at the sight.

“I have only one question,” he begged. “Why?”

“Don’t you know?” a slender male figure stepped forward. “It was for you. We called down the very humour of the gods for you!”

Lar’s forehead slid from horror to wonder and he held himself shivering as he looked from one face to the next. There was a long silence and then a shaking took hold of his body. There commenced what sounded like the chucking of some strange bird. And at last Lar began to laugh the full laughter of his stomach, holding himself as he filled the space of the clearing with roaring guffaw.

The silken, beautiful faces that looked on grew puzzled and doubt pinched at their eyes.

“Ah,” said Lar, “I’m sorry now, I’m sorry. And I hope, that ye won’t consider me the worse for it…”

He wiped away a single tear.

“Do you know what it is… and I think I get it.”