The Overturned Wheelbarrow in Boortmeerbeek

Long ago, when farm work set the rhythm of the days and people still carried flour home by hand, there was a quiet caution in Boortmeerbeek. Not only for thunderstorms, sickness or failed harvests—but for people who had “the name”. That was what they called it, half serious and half afraid: a rumour that slipped like smoke through the stables and caught at the throat.

Everyone knew whom it meant without ever pointing. A woman who walked alone too often. Someone who looked at you as if she knew what you were thinking. A laugh that didn’t belong at a funeral, a gaze that lingered on your child as though it were counting. In those days it was enough to say, in passing, “Careful—she’s got the name.”

And still life went on. People sowed and mowed, kneaded and baked, and when the flour ran out someone had to go to the mill—or to whoever still had a sack put by. That is how this story begins: simply, like a step along a field track.

A woman—the telling gives her no name—loaded a wheelbarrow with flour. The sacks were heavy, the wooden handles smoothed by use. She set off in the early hours, when the sun sits low and the village stretches like someone just awake.

The road was familiar. She knew every rut, every patch where the soil turned soft after rain. She also knew the places where you didn’t dawdle: where the reeds stood taller, where the hedge made a dark tunnel, where the wind could suddenly fall silent.

Halfway along—just as the wheelbarrow creaked under its burden—she saw someone approaching. A figure on the path, neither hurried nor slow, as if time weighed nothing on her. The woman felt it at once: that odd prickling at the nape, the slight tightening in the belly. She looked at the face drawing near and thought, without meaning to: “That’s one of them.”

She tried to soften her stare, to keep her pace even. But the suspicion was already between them, like a cold stone.

Exactly as they were about to pass, it happened. Without warning the wheelbarrow tipped. It was as if an unseen hand shoved beneath the wheel, as if the earth itself leaned sideways for a heartbeat. The sacks jolted, slid, and with a dull sigh the white flour spilled into the dust.

The woman grabbed at the handles, pulled back, tried to hold the weight—but it was as if the thing had already decided to fall. Flour billowed up, blew into her face, crept into her nose and mouth. For a moment there was only that white cloud and the sound of her own breathing.

Then she heard it: a laugh.

Not a polite, quick laugh. Not a laugh of surprise. But a full, loud laugh, as though it had been waiting for precisely this moment. The passer-by—the woman with “the name”—stood still and laughed, and in that laugh was something the flour-woman felt in her bones: not pity, not help, but a kind of satisfied knowing.

The flour-woman could say nothing. She wiped her cheeks, felt the flour sticking to sweat, saw the white heap on the road like a failed offering. And one thought hammered itself into place: it wasn’t an accident. It was done.

She didn’t tell it in the village at once. Things like that grow better in silence; people fear words will only make them firmer. But stories find their way, like water in a ditch. First to a neighbour, then to the baker, then to someone who “had always said so”.

And with the story came advice. People spoke of protection: making the sign of the cross before going out, a prayer you mustn’t mis-say, a bit of iron in your pocket—because iron, they said, kept evil at bay. Some women would hang a sprig of hawthorn by the door, or turn the straw in the stable at night so no witch could find her path in it.

But strongest of all was the unseen rule the village set itself: don’t stare too long, don’t think too hard, and don’t speak names. For whoever speaks the name leaves the door ajar.

So the overturned wheelbarrow remained not merely a mishap on a field track, but a sign. A small, everyday object that suddenly became proof of something larger: that the strange can walk right beside you, on the same road, and know exactly what you suspect.