The one who guessed my name belongs to a world of the strange, a world beneath a thimble and under a hill, beyond seven lands and seas. This person was a name thief.

But beyond that, this is the story of a boy.

It started when he was small, asking for his classmates names and laughing when they suddenly couldn’t seem to spell it the next day.

Accidentally snatching the name off his senile grandmother’s lips and being too afraid to say anything when everyone began throwing around words like Dementia and Alzheimer’s.

A young teen taking someone’s name down for a school project, and taking their name entirely.

He gathered them up, watching the havoc wreaked in their absence but completely unsure of how to put them back. They clung to him, snagged on his psyche like burrs and after a while he realized that the only way to avoid taking them anymore was to cease speaking at all.

It was after all, his clumsy words that had stolen his classmate’s surname, and his poorly phrased request that left a waiter looking completely stunned the next table down. If he ceased talking, if he ran off to where none of the names could find him perhaps, just perhaps, they might all flow back into their owners.

So he moved far away, to the far reaches of the world beneath the thimble, and he dressed in shadows in hopes that he might one day become then and release the names inside. He sealed his lips and never spoke a word, unless perfectly phrased, thought through so that no name would ever stick to him again.

He began a small shop where he sold vials of history and flasks of thought, and for a moment things were quiet. He could almost forget at night the stolen names swirling around inside of him.

But something wasn’t right, and eventually one customer entered his shop, one who came in everyday to pester him and batter him with storms of words and flurries of language, and still he didn’t answer. But one day the first thing she asked him was his name.

“J—“

But he couldn’t remember. Still she was smiling and he had the strangest feeling that he had just lost something.

“What did you just…?”

“Jace, that’s a nice name, I haven’t heard that one before” She had a terrible grin upon her face and he realized what had happened.

“You stole my name!” He cried, outraged and forgetting his previous inclination to silence.

“I’ll give it back” She smiled. “If you can guess mine”

Though he thought it unfair, or perhaps didn’t think much of it at all he took the challenge to heart. Everyday they came in and asked if he had their name yet and everyday he stayed silent, sifting through the names that gathered like pebbles inside him.

Now suffice to say that through no lack of trying, or perhaps a properly placed bribe or two, he was still nowhere closer to finding the girl’s name.

He had sorted through them all, displaced the pieces of others inside of him in his search, overturning some more than once, until their was only one name left inside of him.

To utter that name here would be to leave it to thievery, but when the girl entered his shop, full of words that she spread over the space like falling leaves, he had his first and only guess perched on his tongue.

The girl eagerly accepted her name, and through no shortage of bargaining and verbal swordplay, the name thief had his own returned to him. He realized though, as the letters fell over him like a mantel, that in his searching for the girls name, it seemed many of his own had drifted away.

They were still there, he could feel them sitting beneath his skin, but they didn’t burn, didn’t claw at him from inside.

As the story goes our name thief learns to control his words, he learns to let names roll past him without getting caught in their thorns, and once again, after years of silence, he fills the world beneath the thimble with his voice.