Teaser 52(ii), a flourish of surf – for Rohan Quine’s “The Imagination Thief”

When we’ve downed our shots, she pulls the short red plastic tab protruding from the oblate spheroid of wax enclosing the first cheese wheel she’s grabbed, opens it, and takes a bite of cheese and a bite of bread and we laugh at the funny name of the cheese and the sweet little picture of the laughing red cow on its label. “Moo!” we say to each other several times, and laugh. A gentle warm swimminess spreads within me. I like her, I really do.

I pour us a third vodka, she opens more Laughing Cows and we settle back more comfortably among the paraphernalia of the golf-course. I peer at the various miniature castles and mounds, roundabouts and gateways around us: “Gateway 3” one of the structures is marked, I can’t imagine why. “What a cosy niche we have ourselves here!” I enthuse. “And how comforting that wrecked car is: it distracts us from ourselves, suggests there’s something really happening in our world here this morning, some activity beside ourselves … d’you know what I mean?”

She just nods and smiles, but I can see she’s not just nodding and smiling: she really does know. I look again for that sticky red smear on the cheese, but it’s gone.

I pour us another generous pair of shots, which we knock together again before downing them. “Would you prefer a walk?” I ask her.

“No, no—let’s stay here, please,” she murmurs. After a pause she grins, becoming drunk, and asks, “D’you have a special person in your life?”

“Not at the moment,” I say. “Do you?”

“Oh, yes!” she nods and giggles, then falls silent.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I say, and announce within myself that the most graceful and fitting course of action now will be to accord her the simple dignity—here I hiccup loudly—of telling me as much or as little as she wishes, and not a jot more than this, nor indeed a tittle less.

And so we chat inconsequentially, with the greatest of mutual pleasure, and then lapse, by and by, into the warmest and most coppery of brown studies—two figures reclining nobly in a bucolic afternoon landscape. To stretch my legs I stand up, sway a moment, and squint towards the sea: upon the sand is a flourish of surf, and windswept is the shore…

For more about "The Imagination Thief" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-imagination-thief/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/

To watch any of the 120 complete mini-chapters of the novel’s video-book format (for which this little video snippet here is just a teaser), see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-i-t-video-book/the-imagination-thief-part-iv-video-book/

For links to all of these short teasers, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-i-t-video-book/short-teasers-for-the-imagination-thief-video-book/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-audiobook/

and for the paperback are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/