Golf in the night.

The dog starts to bark at the beginning of a day.
Too early. It's only one hour into the day.
I pad to a window and stare down at my back garden where a man is searching for something on my property.
I open the window and ask, not unkindly, what he wants at one o'clock in the morning?

The midnight golfer

He says he is seeking a lost golf ball.
My garden wall borders a large open space that is covered in grass.
He has been practicing his golf, I am sure of it, for he has a golf club in his hand.
His aimless hacking at my flower bed with the club is not unlike a hungry Antarctic explorer intent on breaking ice to seek for fish to eat.
He is also drunk, I realise as I appear on the ground floor and, soon after, in the garden.
I see he is a neighbour from up the road.
I escort him back through the open gate and lock it after him.
I assure him I will find that ball, and keep it safe, until he calls again.
However, the dog, who comes from a long line of gun dogs, is now chewing experimental lumps out of the found ball.
I go back to bed and wonder how long before dawn appears over the horizon.
And if any of this will seem different then.
Storytelling here

A white horse of another colour

 A woman catches her husband out by parking a horse in his way.
The man becomes too interested in his new desk friend at a start your own business course.
He stays out, to consult with her, later than adult evening courses warrant .

He says he is doing research for the business, market research, questionnaires, that sort of technical thing, he explains too hurriedly and often.
The woman bolts the front door from the inside so she knows when he arrives home. He climbs in a back window that he leaves unlocked for that purpose.

Cometh the hour cometh the horse

The woman borrows a white draught horse from a pal and tethers it outside the back window.

When next the man rushes to his window in the early hours of an excited morning he collides with the belly of the horse.

The horse swings around, hits the man with its haunch and trots off the property, the tie not being good enough to hold her.

The man falls down and cries that a horse has knocked him down in his own back garden; But nobody believes him.

For the moment, the horse is saying nothing.

Storytelling here

Won't Start

A man is selling a bicycle.
A friend has had her bike taken without her permission and needs a replacement.
I road-test it by pedalling as hard as I can and pulling on the brakes to stop it.
This exhausts my technical knowledge and I bargain and we agree on a number that makes us both content, if not exactly happy.
The seller is distracted many times by a ringing phone.
It's a smartphone, I note.
"I said it will not start. I don't know why," he says with shorter patience each time.
I say the bike starts for me, it's a pedal bike.
He looks at me as a simpleton. "The car won't start, the one I'm selling. I said so in the ad, and they haven't stopped ringing ever since."
Who? I ask
Buyers, he says, they all wonder why the car won't start.
"More people want to buy a car that won't start than do a car that will start," he says. "Do you want that bike wrapped?" he asks me as a prelude to seeing the back of me.
I say no thanks and wheel the bike away.
Gently.
Storytelling here

Not Talking

I meet a woman in my mother's town; I have heard we are related to one another.
She tells me we are related one to another and it feels like deja vue just being in her presence.
There are no common facial features between her and anyone I know in my family.
I make the mistake of asking how this relationship could be and she tells me how many, many, years ago a common ancestor met another common ancestor and they married one another and lay down together and now half the town is related to one another.
Not only that; but she is able to step back through the generations and link all of these unsuspecting dead people with one another from beyond the grave.
This is getting too intimate for me without the benefit of an advocate speaking up for the dead generations, that gave us birth.
I say it is nice to realise we were related to half the town.
This as a preliminary to walking away from the madness of the conversation.
But, she catches my coat and says, in a low warning voice, that we who are related are not speaking to the other half.
I say fair enough and leave her there in the sunshine of her mind.
I'm fairly sure she belongs to the mad side of the family.
Storytelling here