I have no daughters

I stop to ask directions in a town I did not grow up in.
I am seeking a girl's school where I am to tell stories for the morning.
The man I ask works in the grounds of a large supermarket; the place I ask is on a bad bend; but he seems like a man that will say "turn right, left and you are there; bye"
Instead, in a local accent that has been generations in the making, he tells me he does not know where the large red-brick building on the top of the hill is.
Nor what it is called when I tease his memory about that either.
"You see," he says "I have no daughters of my own."
I am about to be run over by a large truck tearing around the bend, so I say: "thank you," and try to move away.

"But there is a very good reason why I do not have any daughters," he says as I engage gear for blast-off when the endless flow of traffic eases.
He is about to tell me what his perfectly good reason for not fathering daughters is when a truck horn blares a warning that I have overstayed my welcome on a dangerous bend.
I shout a lie: "That's my cousin in that truck, he's going to that school. I'll follow him," and I drive on.
I still don't know why the man did not produce daughters for a very good reason.
Perhaps I never will.
Storytelling here

In a spotlight of her mind

The drone from the police helicopter wakens the snails in the garden with its persistent whapping noise.
A single spotlight shines down like an usher seeking a smoking butt in a cinema of the memory.
It seeks a miscreant in a car escaping justice and retribution.



Can you see me now?

  Trapped, the pursued pulls up to face chastisement.
But, the woman in the corner house then takes to the night road in her little two-seater.
She weaves about until she reaches the darkened spot where the light from above last touched the earth.
She drives so erratically that the light suddenly re-appears and a chase begins again.
The quietened police cars roar and close the gap.
She doubles back to her own house.
She drives under her carport very quickly and hops into her house slamming the door behind her.
Invisible once more.
Presently, two cops bang on the door and she re-appears in clothes that are a shade too small for her thrusting figure.
Her disappointment is clear when she sees the cops are women and not interested in her attributes.
The judge fines her for wasting police time.
She says she was fined for being herself.
The helicopter flies a different route ever since, most nights.
Storytelling here

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