Bristle’s Background
“So…. It turns out not all Goblins bounce. My old boss certainly didn’t when he stumbled drunk off that roof. All I heard was a filthy curse, a clatter of slate shingles, a fading shout, then a wet thump. No boing, no twang, no hopping back up like nothing was wrong.
“What happened is this: I was sweep’s assistant to a scoundrel of a boss called Sooty Scrag. He spent his days shoving poor Mr. Broom up the filthiest chimneys in Absolom or dropping me down from the top on a rope when the spaces were too narrow. His nights were spent gambling and drinking. When you work staring into filthy blackness I guess it makes sense to get your days and nights confused—which is to say, towards the end he was drinking all day too. A particularly bad idea when scrambling about on slick rooftops.
“Which brings me back to the “not all goblin’s bounce” bit. It was an age after his body was discovered before anyone thought to look up and realize he’d fallen and hit his head rather getting his head hit before he fell. Goblins with bashed in heads lying in the street were the norm in certain part of town. It was longer still before someone found a ladder and climbed up to rescue Mr. Broom and me.
“I soon *found myself* in the bin—in both sense of the meaning. Laying there—with the other broken junk—I realized I wasn’t broken or junk. I was a proper person that still had a purpose not an anthropomorphized scrubbing tool.
“Mr. Broom—who’d just been a broom before—seemed to come to the same realization. His bundle of stacking handle poles snapped together into the clumsy stickman you now see. The curly moustache, brass monocle, and red kerchief I added later when he complained that people addressed his hair of stiff bristles rather than his face.
“And that’s my story so far as it goes.”