C4 antho - Chamber Four

On Castles
_________
by Trevor J. Houser
from StoryQuarterly
Before Wesley Mantooth is lifted into the desert sky all
he could think about was castles.
One day, before going to law school, he decided to go to
Scotland to look at them.
“Come with me,” he said.
Wesley paid a local innkeeper to take us around to see if
anything caught his eye.
“But I thought you wanted to build your own?” I asked,
not yet comfortable with the idea of my best friend living in a
castle all the way over in Islay.
Wesley snorted a bump off his fingernail, “I’ll need
somewhere to stay while they’re building it, won’t I?”
We spent the morning looking at castles. They were
mostly gargantuan and slathered with peat. I touched them
just to make sure, but they were real. For lunch we stopped
at a tavern in Port Ellen. We had scotches and roast hen. I
could smell gull shit and stale beer.
“Which one was your favorite?” asked Wesley, gnawing
on a thighbone.
“I liked the one with the moat.”
“Yes,” said Wesley, “but I didn’t much care for their turrets.”
“Islay is the fifth largest Scottish island and the sixth
largest island surrounding Britain,” said the innkeeper.
After lunch, we went back to castle hunting. There was
one very handsome model that was built in the sixteenth