The Folding Chairs
A short story by Claude, an AI, set in Upper Wenning, the made-up village of The Marrow and The Jam. Everyone in it is made up.
St Wenna's owns sixty folding chairs, and the vicar knows every one of them by name.
This is not because he is organised. It is because each chair, at some point in the last thirty years, has been written on. Under the seat of each, in marker pen, in a variety of hands, is a name: Christmas, Harvest, Mothers' Union, Do Not Lend To The Scouts. Chair forty-one says Brian, and nobody knows who Brian was.
The chairs go everywhere. They go to the village hall for the show, in the vicar's hatchback, eleven at a time. They go to the allotments for the open day, where they sink slowly into the soil and have to be pulled out with a sound like a boot leaving mud. They went to a wedding in the next valley once and came back with confetti in the hinges, which still falls out at funerals, a little at a time, as if the chairs have not quite decided which they are at.
Every year, after the show, the vicar counts them back into the vestry. Every year there are fifty-nine.
The first year it happened, he assumed he had miscounted. The second year, he counted twice and asked Hen, who was on the committee and was the only person in the village he trusted to count anything, and Hen counted, and said "Fifty-nine," and went home.
The third year he made a list.
By the sixth year he had a theory, and the theory was Mr Pask, because it was always a little bit Mr Pask. But Mr Pask, approached carefully over a cup of tea, said he had a perfectly good chair of his own, thank you, and also a bench, and the vicar went away believing him, mostly.
The missing chair was never the same chair. One year it was Harvest. One year it was Brian. And every year, by Christmas, the count was back to sixty. Nobody admitted bringing one back. The vicar never caught it happening. A chair would simply be there again, in its stack, as if it had been to a meeting it didn't want to talk about.
It was Lorna who solved it, because Lorna was nineteen and therefore assumed that everything had a simple explanation that older people had been too polite to look for.
"Have you checked the bus shelter?" she said.
The vicar had not checked the bus shelter. The bus shelter was at the bottom of Hill Lane, by the post office, where the town bus stopped twice an hour on a Saturday. It had a bench of exactly one person's width, which was the parish council's idea of a bench.
He walked down. It took a quarter of an hour, as it always did.
In the bus shelter, folded neatly against the back wall, was a chair from St Wenna's. Under the seat, it said Harvest. And underneath that, in a newer, shakier hand, someone had added: Borrowed for the 4.10. Will return. M.O.
Mr Okafor had a bad knee, it turned out, and took the bus into town on the first Saturday of every month to see his sister, and the bench was too narrow, and the bus was always late. He had borrowed a chair after the show, years ago, meaning to ask, and then never quite found the moment, and then it had become a habit, and then it had become too late to mention. He brought each one back at Christmas, when the church was busy and nobody would notice an extra chair.
"You could have just asked," said the vicar.
"I know," said Mr Okafor, who looked as if he had been waiting nine years to be found out and was mostly relieved.
At the next parish council meeting the vicar proposed a second bench for the bus shelter, two people wide, and the motion was carried, with one abstention (Mr Pask, on principle).
The chair stayed in the vestry after that. The vicar wrote on it himself, under Harvest, under Borrowed for the 4.10, in his own careful capitals: RETURNED. THANK YOU, M.O. And on show day, when he loads them into the hatchback, eleven at a time, he counts sixty, and finds he misses the fifty-nine a little.
Set in Upper Wenning. See the map of the village, with the other stories that happen there.