Baldomero

You can see it on Baldomero's face: he knows something no one else does and he's not about to tell. His red beard has held that half-smile for centuries, and his three-leaf clover isn't for luck, it's for work. At night he slips in where someone sleeps with a knotted brow — the kind who go to bed tired of everything — and he runs the clover across the tip of their nose, softly, once, twice. Nothing more. By morning the person wakes up smiling for no reason and lies there a while staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what they dreamed. They never do. He's long gone by then, knocking the clover against his trouser leg. Those smiles that show up out of nowhere, uninvited, are the ones that were needed most.