The True Word: A Voice in the Little City The Reed & The Flame, #3

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume.
Some prophets come down from the mountain. This one came up out of the tar pits.
He is nobody — a gatherer of pitch in the vale below Sodom, with tar under his nails and the smell of the pits in his skin — when the word arrives in the night like a swallowed coal: the cities of the plain will burn. And he is the one who has to say so.
So he says it. At the gate, in the market, city by city, for forty years. They laugh. They argue, then they tire of arguing, then they make him their fool — the pitch-man who cries fire, good for a coin at a feast between the courses. The sky stays blue. Nothing happens. Every single morning he is proven wrong, and every morning the fire shut up in his bones will not let him keep still.
Part of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle, The True Word is a spare, unsparing short story about faithfulness measured with nothing to show for it — a true word carried into a world that will not hear it, and the man who cannot stop saying it.