The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss

wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He had given up the job he’d spent so long working for. And now here he was, right back where he had started. In the house where his father had told him stories about Gawan and the giants.
    Had he made the wrong choices? Should he have worked at the bookstore, carried on his father’s business, instead of going to graduate school and studying literature? He didn’t know.
    His stomach grumbled, reminding him that he’d had nothing to eat since lunch on the airplane. He walked into town and then down to the harbor to watch the fishing boats. As he stood leaning on the harbor wall, his cell phone rang. He looked at it. The English department, again. He cursed at it under his breath, then threw it as far as he could into the sea.
    Clews had changed since the last time he had been there. The barbershop where he’d gotten his first haircut was now a hair salon, and what had once been a tobacco shop now sold computers. But Mrs. Ross still greeted him when he walked into the pub, and some of the boys he had known from school were there, sitting around the tables, drinking their pints.
    They were talking about how difficult it was to find men willing to go out on the boats.
    “All the boys want to go to university now, like you did, Brendan,” one of them said. What had his name been? Jory Hammett. He’d been a year behind Brendan, and on all the sports teams.
    Although Brendan hadn’t ordered, Mrs. Ross put a large bowlof fish soup in front of him. “Eat up, dearie,” she said. “You look as though you need it.”
    “So, you’re needing men on the boats,” he said. “What about me?”
    Jory looked at him for a moment. “Aye, you’ll do. Think you can wake up early enough?”
    He laughed for the first time in days. “I think so.”
    As soon as he could, he got a haircut—not at the hair salon, none of the fishermen went there. Instead, Jory’s wife Gwenna ran a clipper over his head. Afterward, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, running his hand over what felt like a bristle brush. He no longer looked like Dr. Brendan Thorne. For the first time since he’d left for Oxford, he looked like he belonged in Clews, on one of the fishing boats or sitting in the pub. It gave him a sense of belonging that he had not felt for a long time.
    Fishing kept him occupied, gave him an income. When he wasn’t out in the boat, he worked on his father’s house, patching the holes he found in the roof, clearing the brush that had grown up around it. It was some ways out of town, at the edge of the forest, and he grew to like the silence. He could hear birds, squirrels. And sometimes, if he sat still long enough, a fox would come out of the forest and stare at him, its red fur vivid against the tree trunks.
    When winter came, he chopped firewood for the stove and started reading the books he had read as a child. He’d forgotten how much they had meant to him. Whenever he thought of Evelyn, he chopped more firewood or went for a walk through the forest, hoping the physical exertion would help. It did, at least for a while, although he could never banish her from his thoughts for long.
    One morning, as he sat at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of fried liver and onions, it came to him. He would write a book. Not an academic book. No. There were already too many of those. It would be a book about knights, and giants, and love:
The Tale of the Green Knight
, but for children. He had to write these ideas down. He’d left his laptop in his office at Bartlett; it had been given to him by the college anyway, and for months now he hadn’t missed it. But he needed some paper and a pen. There would be paper and pens in his father’s desk. He went into the study and opened the desk drawer.
    After his father’s death, he hadn’t gone through the desk, hadn’t wanted to disturb anything. He had simply left. It felt strange now, looking through the remnants of his