Catching A Thief

 

I arrive home.

A dapper, rotund chap, in a brown suit, is rummaging inside our porch.

Seeing me, he gives a start of surprise and dives behind the umbrella stand. It’s nowhere near big enough to hide him, so he sidles out whistling, with a look of studied unconcern, edging towards the open doorway, then dives out and legs it. I see a clean pair of heels and a blur disappearing into the bushes.

“Should’ve been armed,” says a neighbour.

Nah, bad idea. We’d have ended up with a 50,000-piece umbrella stand and he’d have shown me that clean pair of heels just the same.

He’d been helping himself to a newly delivered sack of corn and was the sleekest, shiniest rat I’ve ever met. I admired his aplomb, but won’t be welcoming him back.

***

Originally published in The Daily Cuppa.

Wide, High, Long, & Boundless

 

We live in an area of big skies. I guess everyone does really, but we get to see a lot of ours. No mountains blocking the view, no skyscrapers. We live on a large clay plain. 

There’s always a different picture painted on the sky. In the one above, I see a giant version of a standard died-while-changing-my-duvet-cover ghost looming over the fields.

It’s not always see-forever flat, the land undulates, sometimes deceptively. We are up to our necks in ancient archeology, much of it unexplored, as a neighbour found out to their cost when digging out for a kitchen extension:

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