The Moke Man
Flash Fiction Story
By Lorette C. Luzajic
The chimney sweep was a
bushy-bearded, stubby-fingered fellow with ornery eyes, with a once-fine black
coat long cracking along the button line, and suffocating on more than a
century of soot. Every December, Weihnachtszeit, the wooden man was
unwrapped from his tissue paper swaddle and placed on the mantle among pine
boughs and camels and a Peanuts creche, with Woodstock as tiny saviour in the
manger.
Der räuchermänn had travelled a long
way to small town Ontario from the ancient forests of Erzgebirge, and we were
always happy to see him. When my brother Hans was small, at the first snow fall
he would bleat, moke man, moke man, before he could pronounce “smoke.” We
were transfixed by the figurine. Through winter, the moke man puffed his pipe,
stuffed on incense cones from the old world. The air filled with frankincense
and marzipan, the scent of Christmas.
There had been an old nutcracker
doll, too, and tiny wooden miners and angels, brought across the Ore Mountains
and the ocean and the war, now surrendered to time. The moke man was a vestige
from a world we never knew that still ran in our blood, the harsh coal mines of
silver veins where our ancestors had laboured, the folklore of dwarves that
dwelled there, and lucky pigs, and spotted red mushrooms, Glückspilz,
symbolizing good fortune and prosperity.
Today Hans arrives juggling an
armload of presents and Pfeffernüsse. Linda and my nephew Simon follow,
stomping the weather from their boots in the front foyer. Merry Christmases all
around. Simon heads straight to the tree to inspect the presents underneath,
his attention shifting to the fat cat sleeping below the dangling baubles. I
put on tea and Hans cuts the cake into chunks for dunking. When Simon makes his
way over to the moke man and stares solemnly up at his crotchety, familiar
face, we light the incense cone. Pipe! Simon exclaims, and we chuckle.
“I used to talk to that thing,”
Hans says. “The chimney sweep. He was so alive to me. He told me all kinds of
harrowing tales about the mines. Elves and Moosleute.” He means the moss sprites- the old mountains
were populated with critters, folkloric creatures of protection and mischief. As
Hans recounts his memory, I recall a nightmare I had when I was young, dancing
with the nutcracker doll. Instead of the evil rats, the villain in the dream
was a troll: in a jealous rage, he beat my nutcracker prince over the head with
a wire chimney brush. He had the same cranky visage as our little räuchermänn.
I shudder from the recollection,
glancing over at the incense man, stoic, contentedly puffing away. “So long as
he has his tobacco, he’s happy,” I say.
Simon crumples a cookie in his
little paw, with some of it making its way into his mouth. We finish our tea
and sweets. Hans picks Simon up to get him ready for his nap and Linda and I
settle into the kitchen to begin preparations for the holiday dinner. The
turkey is long in the oven; we cut up red cabbage and onions and apples for the
rotkraut. We send Hans to the cellar for a bag of potatoes to boil and mash.
The fat cat chooses a new perch nearby in hopes of errant morsels.
When Simon is sleeping, Hans joins
us. “Whatever happened to Opa’s nutcracker?” I ask him, because of remembering
the dream. “I loved that thing when I was small.”
“You wanted to marry him,” Hans
teases me.
“Oh, yes. Like every little girl
raised on the Christmas ballet. The magic boyfriend. But he didn’t stick around
long. I don’t remember seeing him since long before Mom died.”
“He’s been gone longer than that,”
Hans says. “I remember asking about him one Christmas when he didn’t appear. It
was the year we did The Grinch as a play at school. You would have been eleven.
Mom was upset because she found him in smithereens. Don’t you remember telling
us that the chimney sweep had killed him? I assumed that you were the one who
broke the doll.”
I look up sharply from the herbs I
was chopping. I had no recollection of telling anyone about the dream, or of
Mother sweeping my prince into the dustbin of history.
“It was a strange thing to say,”
Hans continues. “But I understood that you were deflecting blame. You didn’t
want to disappoint Mother. And honestly, I made up the same kinds of stories in
my mind. The chimney doll told me some grisly tales about a battalion of smoke
men against the evil spirits of the coal mines. And he talked about how the
villagers relied on them to suffocate babies in their cribs. The families of
the Ore valleys were so poor that this was a solution when there were too many
mouths to feed. Talk about an overactive imagination! I must have absorbed
those ideas from the old fairy tale books.”
Just then an outcry from the
bedroom. Linda bolts to him, carrying him back to the kitchen. His red face is
streaked with snot and tears. “Simon had a bad dream,” she says, murmuring into
his curls. “Too much sugar does it every time.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I assure him.
“What happened?”
“The moke man was in my room!” Simon
cries. “He tried to push his broom down my throat!”
The details of the dream are lost
in his wailing. Linda rocks the child, and Hans and I go over to the fireplace.
Of course the chimney sweep is where we left him on the mantle, patiently
awaiting his next pipeful.
But I see there is a small heap of
burner ash on the floor below.
I follow a dark trail all the way
to Simon’s room. His snowmen sheets are streaked with soot and tangled in a
heap by his pillow.
Lorette C. Luzajic is addicted to flash, often inspired by visual art. Her work has been widely nominated, anthologized, taught in writing courses from Tennessee to Egypt, and translated into Urdu, Arabic, and Spanish. Her most recent book is Disgust (Cyberwit Books, 2025), a collection of ekphrastic stories on the theme of illness, written during recovery from breast cancer and a botched leg surgery. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions anthologies, and she has a story forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2026.
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