The Troll’s Teeth

Realizations were coming to Noah. The first was that loneliness wasn’t his problem. Yes, Ma Bertie and Daddy Mac and his father were gone and his mother was rarely around and Betty his girlfriend was off to university and probably a life that would leave him behind, but he was already discovering that the natural world was all the companionship he needed. A boat and the ocean, the granite coast and the islands, these were his sole requirements. These spoke to him, always.

What he lacked was a living. High school was almost behind. Ahead was the need to pay for everything himself. For which he felt both unprepared and, given his options, unwilling. He wasn’t very good at much but contemplating the nature of things and telling stories. He had texted as much to Betty.

It was her reply that had turned him around, if only once again to face that natural world that was his strength and solace.

“Stop complaining,” she said. “Tell your stories. Only tell them to children. No one else would understand.”

It was a spark that caught fire. He realized that he was always having conversations with his floating world pals, conversations in which they told him things that ordinary people might not know. What better occupation than to share? Because ordinary people, after all, were the salt of the earth. Ma Bertie taught him that. It was the preface to her diary, that was now his diary, and he had it by heart. And children because … because why?

“Because you have a childlike heart. Duh,” said Betty.

And so it began. He was out when she texted him, and the first thing he saw after that were the troll’s teeth.

He took a picture with his phone, sped home and made the boat fast carefully so as not to risk losing it in his excitement, then went in and locked the door.

Because Ma Bertie was his heart and soul and it had been her diary and she had always written in it with a pen and ink, so Noah did likewise, although his penmanship left much to be desired.

“The troll,” he wrote carefully and awkwardly, “was once free to wander the coast. Our granite coast. But he had to hide out before daylight or be turned to stone. And one night, having drunk too much troll wine, which is made of raw thunder and fermented hoo-hah, the dawn caught him splashing around in utter glee in his bathtub, that was the cove we mere humans describe as Rogues Roost.”

30 March 2026
Texas Jim
Rogues Roost, Nova Scotia