Exclusive story: Horses Ain't For Courses; Vegas is Vegas, BabY - my latest TOME coming THIS Saturday; Poem: 12 Font; Tales From The UniversE 52 - newsletter from A View Of Spring
An arcadia of imagination
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1. Vegas is Vegas, BabY
My latest book is coming this Saturday, 2 March, to my substack - in four parts:
Manchester United's summer 2023 tour of New York, New Jersey, San Diego, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas penned my way.
The first part is FREE; the rest for the £4.99 a-month subscription fee for which you receive everything else paid for on here.
2. Short Story
Horses Ain’t For Courses
‘THESE ARE THE FABLES U R IN THRALL 2’ seen on a village pub toilet wall
He sat at the chiminea in the cool late winter air watching flames lick up from the bulged clay belly and out the cylindrical opening towards a royalblue sky as if the view tonight was a stenciled print of what he saw that was laid out across the real vista and he regretted again what a bad man he had been for too many years.
He got divorced by his woman and his children forgot him because he ran away from them. He was angry, he was bitter, he was sad, he was a whole load of other characteristics he was ashamed of.
He looked at the faded photograph of them all together before he broke the family up.
His wife cradled her head on his shoulder. She is 27, he is 26. Their three kids stand alongside them, age 6, 4, 2. The five of them are on a beach on the north coast of Scotland in a place named Bettyhill. Northwest is Greenland. Further northwest is the Arctic.
They are looking into the camera as rays of sun shimmer. They look happy - the children smile into the camera, young, innocent, no clue of what life is hurling at them even, then, in this moment.
What he is hurling at them. What he is hurling at himself.
They were on a driving holiday traversing the coast. Being there magnified the ancient feelings he fought to shake and could not and which ate at him - frustrations, disappointments. He could not accept his life now of work, responsibility. The news that this was it announced only to him. The long years ahead.
The photograph taken the day before what he did. The holiday many years ago and the morning after they all stood together on the beach he left them without word. Took a local bus from Bettyhill headed for Aberdeen where a ferry would take him on to Shetland. Riding away from the farmhouse rented for a week and watching this recede to a blur and wondering what he did and why and yet unable to stop because the question of how the rest of his days away from them would look and feel felt impossible to resist.
Was it? Was any true desire possible to deny? The answer seemed only no because the dread and anguish he felt as finally from his sight went the farmhouse where they still slept yet to wake to discover what he did: still this did not cause him to ask the driver to stop the bus and let him off so he could run back in the raw dawn to prevent the fate he wrote for all of them.
And as the bus rattled along the country the tears that fell from his face went dry and a new thrill enveloped as if he kept waking to buttercupped sunlit morns and as he surged toward the new life he made the images that rose were no longer of his children young and wondering why he left but of the times he lived before them and her.
Coming out of a club into Balearic heat and the day. You are young, you have always been young, you will always be young. This is how you feel. This is how you will always feel.
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