The Runaway and the Timehopper

Chapter 1

Sweep to the left.

Sweep to the right.

Sweep all the dirt.

Sweep in the night.

Well, really it was morning, but that part didn't matter. Technically, it was still night time if you counted the fact that it was still dark out. Plus, it rhymed so much more easily and was a far better tune to be singing in your head than any of the other ones he came up with.

It helped Jack cope with all the smoke and soot he had to grease his elbows with. That stuff was disgusting and sticky, and any that didn't fall down the chimney he was climbing would splatter him right on the head in the middle of the starless night (morning?) sky even though he was above everyone else.

There was a reason he never wore his best clothes to school. Especially not the flat cap.

Jack knew he would have to keep going. No matter how hard it was to breathe, no matter how much he would sneeze and cough, he would have to continue clearing chimney after chimney after chimney to fulfil the contract his parents signed him up for. If he didn't, they would take their property away or... something like that.

He wasn't really listening when the stakes were explained to him. He probably wouldn't have understood them either, but would often ask himself what those stakes were.

He did know, however, that they were bad, since he was taken away from his parents and was told that he wouldn't see them for quite a while.

During the first week or so, he and the other new sweeps would cuddle together and cry each other to sleep. This habit was quickly snuffed out by the master sweep, who had an uncanny gift for punishing those he deemed as misbehaving miscreants. This resulted in a first week of pure pain due to his and the other newbies' complaining about the smoke and the climbing and the homesickness being met with a belt to the hind.

Not only that, but he was remarkably good at finding other poor children to join his family business of chimney sweeps. At any given time he was always out looking for new potential employees as he harassed his current ones to hurry up and finish the job.

What was the job?

In essence, the job was to collect soot from a chimney to be sold by the master sweep.

This would be easy if they had a brush or something—but in classic fashion, they had to climb the chimney and get all the soot out with their bare hand and straining arms as their master lit fires beneath them to speed them up. There was an onslaught of coughing among his fellow sweeps as they barely held themselves in the chimney, and a number of them would get stuck in the chimneys and stop breathing.

They were rarely mourned over until later that day at school, as anyone who spoke up would have to climb up their next chimney with bruised legs, increasing their chance of getting stuck or falling down.

Jack himself had spoken up a few times about how unfair he thought the whole situation was. They were being treated like slaves, working endless hours of hard labour and yet receiving no share of the soot sales.

His legs were not very thankful.

Yeah, he really should have died by now.

One of his closest friends had already died to smoke by that point, and he had witnessed many other suffocations and fallings that he honestly thought that being spanked would instantly lead him to the same fate.

Surprisingly, it didn't. It only left him alive with the knowledge that he could have died instead of all of his much harder-working peers. Of course the useless one survives, and that fact felt terrible.