The Marsh.

By Tim Barker (1/11/2000)

(435 words)

There once lived a man at the end of a village but he was no ordinary man for he could see into the future this enabled him to always be prepared for what others never saw until it was upon them. One day he determined that he should ride his horse across the marshes on the outskirts of the village until he came to the meadow by the river. However, due to his natural talent for prediction he decided to take a blunderbuss with him as he knew it would indirectly save his life, not because there were any dangerous animals lurking in the marshes and not because he would find himself starving to death with an urgent need to murder an innocent animal for food. It will become apparent why. The man mounted his trusty nag and made for the low lands where he knew he would find the dark, dank no-mans land of his desires. Innumerable inns he passed on his way to greet destiny but none of them succeeded in tempting his palate or whetting his appetite even though the offer of ‘pub grub’ seemed unassumingly inviting. Eventually, as darkness drew its funereal veil over another day’s proceedings the man realised that he had arrived at the object of his fantasies. THE MARSH lurked, menacingly as he dismounted his vehicle, took out his weapon and began to penetrate the vacuous abyss. Inevitably, the object of our studies soon found that he was out of his depth as he took one careful step after another…so he held the gun in his mouth, squeezed the trigger, letting the buckshot relieve him of any sense of helplessness. The afterlife he had not predicted, he realised that his third eye had been blinkered from which he drew an immense sense of self-satisfaction. Ahead of him lay a blank canvas of possibilities so he decided to adopt many varied pastel shades in an attempt to improvise a future, something that he had previously not had the luxury of choosing. Looking back he now realised that his mortal existence had been staid and bland as prediction was the forerunner of boredom. As death stretched to infinity ahead of him the man finally felt free. At that moment an eagle swept from high above and landed on the burnt-out wreck of an old oak which stood to his left. The eagle turned its head. The man smirked then let out a sigh which shook the dimensions of which he was now a part. But nobody batted an eyelid. Apart from his trusty steed at the edge of THE MARSH.