The Cheese Apprentice

A friar on a monk’s bicycle whizzed passed the harridan upending her skirt and mussing her hair. As it was fish-day she took it as a message from His Holiness and crooked her head in observance, of what she wasn’t quite sure. Von Romani whirled by, his friar’s frock billowing like a windsock. The Italian monastery sat on the hill overlooking the valley; the same valley where the harridan played as a wee girl, pigtailed and birched in culottes and knee socks. A yellow saffron moon sat low in the night sky. A night sky simmered in the pot of the moon. No moon, no sky. No there no here. No nothing no. These were the thoughts of the bicycle-riding friar, eyes trained on the pebbly asphalt ahead of him, surplice windily wafting wildly. The harridan knew of two such friars who wore smocks stitched and hemmed from burlap and odds and ends of coarse linen. They both rode two-speeds with tassels on the handle grips, spidery tentacles, the hems of their smocks clipping madly in the spokes. Von Romani was a cheese-apprentice; his job was weighing whey and separating the curds from the blessed cheese. He ladled the stir-pot, a ropey marmalade of cheese and curds, pushing the punter-stick up against the side of the stir-pot ensuring a good measure of whey to curd. The friar in charge of cheese production, Brother Ripoll, swaddled the prepared cheese in hemp sacs and sent them by oxcart to market, a few miles down the mountain.