Anna emptied the bucket over the fence, without looking where the garbage was landing. The wind stirred and her unpinned hair stuck to her wet face. With a dirty hand she rubbed her forehead and went back to the house. The wind was blowing again from the wrong direction.
Life was hard enough in a medieval village, without having to struggle for fresh air. Her brothers were gone to work in another town, the house was impossible to sell and the king was ignoring the problem, waiting for it to resolve itself.
Actually, the king was trying very hard to pretend that it wasn’t his fault.
Not that too many people would dare to accuse the king. Not to his face, anyway.
Anna remembered the king as a kid. They used to play together in that same field where she was now dumping the garbage, back when that skinny kid with large ears was just Jack.
That was before he… Well, Anna wasn’t even sure about the details of the story. Or should she say stories. She heard so many versions of the events that happened only two years ago that she wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
So, unlike most of the villagers, she tried to ignore the fact that her former childhood friend was now a king and that they all lived in a world where magic was commonplace. But what she could not ignore was the smell.
The smell was everywhere. It was horrible and it was not going away too soon. In the city, where the nobles lived, the fancy people made a mockery of it by resorting to fashionable handkerchiefs and expensive perfumes. But out here, in the village, it was unbearable.
And the fact that the king was ignoring it was the worst part. After all, wasn’t he the one who killed the giant, accident or not?
It had been Jack the one who brought magic to earth with his magic beans and it was the same Jack who now was not taking responsibility for the decomposing giant that made life impossible in the village.
Anna stopped in the doorway and took a deep breath, but started coughing immediately. The wind was blowing from the direction of the giant corpse, engulfing the only world she has ever known in that horrible smell. With a sigh she entered her modest house and slammed the wooden door shut.
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