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2026
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The Apprentice
by Emily Rinkema( Prose Winner)
The first time Ellen visited the butcher was a month after Colin died. She was driving home from Hannaford and before she had time to think about why she did it, she had her blinker on and was slowing down to turn into the long driveway with the old Butcher sign nailed to a tree.
She had never been down the driveway before, and it was longer than she and Colin had imagined, winding at least a quarter mile through the woods before ending at a small white house with a surprisingly modern attached barn. There was a truck parked in front of the house and a wooden sign on a post that said OPEN, the letters burned into the wood.
Ellen parked. Colin would have laughed at the permanence of the word open. We should come back at midnight, he would have said, and then it would have become an ongoing joke. At odd times
he would have said, Hey El, think the butcher’ s open?
The barn was beautiful, the kind of building featured in one of those magazines about Vermont but sold mostly to people from Connecticut, people like Ellen and Colin, who spent their twenties dreaming of living on a dirt road like this one, imagining what it would be like to own a barn. She stared at the vertical wood planks, stained a deep red, nine-paned windows on either side of the black door, iron fixtures.
Colin would have told El not to come here alone, not that he would have needed to. They had imagined the type of butcher that lived in the middle of nowhere with an old sign nailed to a tree. They had made up stories of disappearing pets and lost children, of a fat, whitehaired butcher, knife in hand, bloody apron around a pot belly. It didn’ t help that no one in town knew anything about the place other than that it used to be a butcher shop, twenty years ago, thirty, fifty. I think he retired, came into some money, someone said. I think he got tired, someone else said. I think he’ s senile, I think his wife died, I think he died.
Ellen knew she would knock on the door. It was too late to change her mind, really. She had already parked. What else could she do now? You can leave, Colin would have said, that’ s what you can do now.
The first thing Ellen noticed when the butcher opened the door was that he was tall, over six feet for sure, and skinny, not at all like she and Colin had imagined. He was at least seventy-five, she thought, comparing him to her own father. The next thing that Ellen noticed was the smell. Garlic first, but also onions and thyme and something else she couldn’ t name but that she felt in her chest.
“ Come in,” the butcher said, as if he’ d been
30 VERMONT MAGAZINE