HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
My career as a city crier is going nowhere and I am leaving the industry. I bumped into Bertram the other day and discovered he is now city crying in Canterbury.
Canterbury!
From the stories!
Bertram started crying at the same time as me and I’m still here in Skunthorpe. Of course I know that before you get your big break you have to deal with shit for a while. Literally, because the audience throws shit at you if they don’t like you.
Oh, that reminds me –

HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
Please follow the latest public health guidelines and leave your feces in a neat pile in front of your home.not hurled at your hard-working town crier!

Also, we’ve run out of room in the Witches’ Drowning Pit – it’s more of a drowned witch than a pit at this point. So if you know of another pit, let the Chief Witch Hunter know.

By the way, we would like to point out that we no longer have drinking water.

Wow, no one is listening. What am I doing here with my stupid scroll?
They listened to Bertram.
Bertram is the same age as me, yet he has so many followers: people in Canterbury who literally follow him everywhere.
Thinking about Bertram’s undeserved success makes me want to puke. Or maybe it’s the fermented witches’ drinking water.

HEAR! There has come a new game from the East, called “chess.”
So now you can play that instead of the traditional sport of Skunthorpe, where you throw hammers at each other.

Should I just move to LA?
I mean Lake Ass, the lake where everyone gets tuberculosis.
But I’ve heard that it takes forever to get anywhere if you can’t drive a cart. Because you have to step over the bodies of all the people who died of tuberculosis.

HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
The feral dogs are back and angrier than ever, so if you find one in your home, leave or die. You can’t beat them in a fight.

I’ve been crying in the city for ten years and I’m terrible at it. By that I mean the only thing I technically own is one chamber pot. And that keeps attracting the feral dogs.

I should quit and be a shoemaker like my dad always wanted. Every time I talked about my dreams he would cough up blood. Although that was always when I talked about something. He used to live in Lake Ass.

I try to do something different with the form anyway. I am an observing town crier.
I am not an executioner.
Oh, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Take my wife, if ye please—she is for sale.” We have all heard that. It is all crying about courtship, thinking of intimate relations, and then casting yourselves down before God for your sins.

I think I can try to work with the audience.
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
Is there anyone here from out of town?
No?
Has no one here ever been anywhere else?
Okay then.

I just thought that crying in the city was my calling. When I was younger, everyone would always say, “Percival, you’re so loudand i just knew.

I’ve been thinking about writing an epic ballad about a town crier struggling to survive in the big city. You know what they say: shout about what you know.
I need to stop waiting for opportunities and create my own, like that woman who goes from town to town showing off her burlap sack full of live fleas. Maybe someday I can have my own “flea sack” and reap the same praise as she does. It would be a welcome change from the reason I’m covered in fleas now: I’m also covered in human shit and there’s no water untainted by witches to wash it off. Maybe then I’ll finally stand out from all those other people screaming in the streets, mad with fever. One can dream…

Until then—
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
If you have leprosy and your arm or leg falls off, don’t just leave it lying around on the street. That’s probably what keeps attracting the feral dogs. ♦