The competition was of a theme, "West Coast Wonders," in keeping with the festival's Kintyre locale, and it was limited to 500 words - a tough challenge.
Here is "A Wet Coast Tale" by Mike R. Hunter.
I dreamed it would end like this – at the bar, solitary, besotted, trousers soaking wet, a puddle of my own making edging slowly toward the snooker table surrounded by locals intent on their match, oblivious to the tentacle of liquid creeping toward the feet of the bigger of the lot as he struggles to focus on his next shot. Should he discover the puddle, and me as its source, this might not end well. Deep inside me, a cord unwinds like a bath towel having discharged its liquid burden.
In my dream I’m old, confused, incontinent. In reality, I’m
at the bar in Ben Arthur’s Bothy, as dripping wet as I’ve ever been, having
just spent the day in the Alps – not those Alps, the other ones, the Alps of Arrochar,
in the west of Scotland – where I had a date with Beinn Artair, The Cobbler,
who, just so you know, didn’t show himself.
Nine hours ago, I got off the coach at Tarbet – no, not
Tarbert; not the one on Harris either; Tarbet, on Loch Lomond – having caught the
wrong coach from Glasgow, and having walked the extra miles to Arrochar, the driver’s
rebuke ringing in my ears. The Loch Long fog suited my self-recrimination for
the error.
In a loch-side park in Arrochar, I was mocked by a chainsaw carving
of a Viking that, to be honest, looked to me more like a monkey, and that
lifted my spirits a bit. The real healing began as I stepped off the local
forest park trail through a curtain of mist and rain waving down the strath onto
a gravel path lined by brown and lifeless bracken.
At the mid-point of the walk, there stand a pair of
sentinels, two of hundreds of erratics left behind by the ice-age equivalent of
a tsunami, or evidence of some leviathan struggle, or perhaps hived off the
formidable cliffs to my right. Those cliffs weep, like many in the Highlands,
as though they, and they alone, are responsible for keeping the loch and the
oceans full.
It is difficult to convey the deep sense of self one engages
with in the Highlands, wet and miserable though they can be at times. I
sometimes feel as though I was born with the express purpose of being here. As I
leaned into the modest grade, an idiotic grin stretched my face – the extremity
of that inner cord winding up in excitement – a store of energy to be called
upon in some future moment.
At the feet of The Cobbler, irony filled my boots and mixed
with the water. Like me, he had his head in the clouds this day, and we failed
to meet.
It is strange to be simultaneously soaking wet and thirsty, unless
your hydration ritual includes lager, as mine does. The Cobbler stood me up,
but Ben Arthur’s bothy sat me down. The inner cord unwinds, slowly. The release is cathartic.
The coach to Glasgow is nigh.
=30=
