Hunter

So I was wandering around on the hillside with my rifle. What? Yes a gun, of course, but more specifically a rifle. Yes it does matter, it’s a necessary level of detail for the story, which would become obvious if you would shut up and let me tell it. So I was on the hillside with my rifle. I was looking for deer, a specific deer actually. I’d see him up there before about a week earlier but at the time I was shooting pheasants so I had my shotgun. And anyway, I wasn’t nearly close enough to him.

This time I was coming prepared, I had my rifle and a pack. I was in for the long haul, it might take a while to stalk him and get close enough to get a good shot in, and even then I could still miss. The day was going to be long, whether I saw him again or not. Even if I didn’t bag him today I hoped that I’d at least see him again. Now I know that people use words like majestic and beautiful when they talk about seeing a stag in the wild, and to be honest with you I think it’s bollocks most of the time. But this animal is certainly impressive, I wont overstate it any more than that.

As luck would have it I would bump into my old friend the stag again. But luck, well it was bad luck for me. There was a track that ran along the hill, coming around a slight bend. I walk slowly around the bend because I knew that I’d get a good view of the prow of the next hill, the hill where I’d first seen him. They’re territorial, deer. While I didn’t expect him to be standing right there, I felt like once I got to this point it would be the beginning of the stalk. So I was feeling a sense of anticipation as rounded the bend. I didn’t for the life of me expect what happened though.

My eyes shot straight up towards the hilltop and I can tell you that they immediately widened. There he was, right where I’d seen him the last time. But I wasn’t excited. Shocked more likely. The stag was standing on his hind legs, upright like a man. With a rifle balanced on his shoulder and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I hardly had a chance to take in the strangeness of the whole situation before I heard the gunshot ring out. Well, I can tell you that I did not turn around for another look. I ran, and as I was running I could hear shouting behind me “I know what you came up here for”. At first I thought there must be someone else here, but… “think you’re gonna shoot me do you? Ha, reckon I’ll shoot you first”.

I ran and I ran. I didn’t once stop or look back, just kept going until I got to my truck, and when I got there I jumped in and drove off as fast as I could. There’s something about seeing something completely unbelievable that just scares you half to death. I’m sure you don’t believe me now, but I know what I saw. There’s no doubt in my mind at all and I don’t really care what you think at the end of the day. But there’s just one thing I can’t quite figure out. How’d he pull the trigger? No deer I’ve ever seen has fingers. 

Donkey

Sometimes it’s tough being a donkey. I’m used to it though, even when it’s raining and cold, and I’m all wet and soaked I can usually see the bright side of things. But getting hit by lightening? That’s probably just one step too far for me. I can’t quite turn the other cheek to that. It has made me start to think that maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe I’m not lucky after all, maybe the gods do have it in for me.

I always thought I was fortunate to be living on the side of this hill. It’s an old volcano apparently. You know, we donkeys aren’t as stupid as we’re always made out to be. I’ve overheard the humans talking, I know what a volcano is. And yes of course I can understand English. Just because I don’t have the fine motor skills in my jaw and mouth and tongue, it doesn’t mean my ears aren’t working. So I’m aware that I’m on the side of a volcano, and I wonder if maybe there’s something of an omen in the whole lightening and volcano thing. Plus there’s the fact that I live on a graveyard, humans seem to hold a lot of superstition around graveyards.

So I always thought I was lucky, there’s plenty of grass here and I’m expected to keep it short, easy enough for someone of my donkeyness. And I get scraps from the priest in the church next to the graveyard, that’s always a treat. For most of the time, life is just quite rosy, if you take a simple perspective. But now I’m wondering, I’m starting to maybe think of this from a human point of view. Maybe I’m cursed.

It isn’t a big graveyard. I’m stuck behind a cast iron fence that keeps me within the same twenty-metre radius my whole life. The area all around my home and up the hillside further, it’s all houses and shops and other kinds of buildings that I can’t quite make out from my vantage point. I’m penned in by the fence, and the fence is penned in by all of the houses. I can’t run free, all I can do is plod the same patch of grass with no other animals around. Oh sure, there are pets in some of the houses, dogs and cats. But they’re all so stuck up, even the dogs wont come near me. I don’t know why they think they’re any different to me. They rely on the humans just as much as I do.

I do have a small tree near one corner of the graveyard. Back in my more optimistic days I used to count that as a blessing. In bad weather I’d scurry towards it for shelter, or at least the idea of shelter. I can see now that it doesn’t keep me any drier or hold off any of the wind. It’s too small to make any difference. The scraps used to make a difference to me on those cold days as well. Something to look forward to. But now that I’m taking a more human outlook on life I can see that the scraps aren’t a treat for me. The scraps are just what someone else didn’t want. I get second choice, and even then it isn’t an actual choice.

When the lightening struck I thought, “oh great, things couldn’t get any worse than this”. But now that I’ve been thinking about it things are pretty dire around here. In fact, I think I was a lot happier before I thought about how unlucky I am. 

The Jester

“Well, I thought it was funny” the jester muttered to himself as he walked home in the rain, umbrella blown inside out and discarded in the bin five minutes back. He knew that he’d been warned, but he didn’t really think it was that inappropriate. It was the kind of material that had gone down well in the past, he just couldn’t adjust to the new reality that faced him.

He honed his craft in a time when the rules were clear and his job was more or less spelled out for him. There were areas he couldn’t go, of course there were. He would never insult directly, and he would always steer clear of mentioning the Queen. But back then you could find the real comedy, if you spoke the truth a little bit. Well it made the laughs all that more genuine. And his old boss could take the joke, he appreciated it, it was a bit of a check for him.

The jester didn’t know what he’d do now. He didn’t go into this jestering game thinking he’d ever have to find a new job. He work hard through his apprenticeship, he learned his craft and honed his skills. He had become the master that he always wanted to be, making it to the peak of his field. He felt he was too old to find a new field now. What does a former jester do? There was no precedent for this.

He tried to resist the temptation to blame, he never believed in it. His was a game of stating the facts as they were, people made their own conclusions and laid their own blame. He was tactful, he was sensitive, and he never blamed. But now he couldn’t help it, he understood that things had changed but he felt there was finally some blame that he could lay. The new King was the problem, he was the source of the Jester’s trouble.

The new King was far too young for his post. “The young people these days”. The jester was muttering again. The King’s attention span was too short, his mind always off on something else, he wasn’t following the narrative that the jester was laying out. He didn’t want the jester’s nuance and he didn’t want anything that was too direct. How could you deal with that? He was too sensitive, his father had a thicker skin, everyone his age does.

Standing at the bus stop now, the jester had abandoned any efforts to stay out of the rain. Nothing could stop him getting any wetter now. Anyway, his mind was in some other place by now. It was circling around, his mind, on a journey that he wasn’t really conscious of. The jester’s mind had floated around above him and was starting to come back around in a circle. As the headlights of the approaching bus blinded him for a moment he almost stopped thinking all together. He saw it all more clearly now, he couldn’t change what had happened to him, but only how he reacted to it.

By the time he got back to his house the jester’s mood had changed entirely. He wasn’t muttering to himself any more. Talking to himself still. Yes. But it wasn’t muttering, he was running through his thoughts again and again. Each time he was surer about it. He didn’t need the King to tell his jokes to. Look on the bright side he told himself, out loud and subconsciously. The King could have killed him, back in the jester’s day, back with the old king, and the king before that, it was the kind of thing that happened. No the jester still had his life, and he still had his mind. He didn’t need a court and a King to tell his jokes, to ply his trade. He could do what he’d always done, he’d just need a new audience. At that stage he looked around his house, he looked at his big TV, at his awards on the mantle piece, and at his views across the city and to the harbour. He could carry on telling his jokes, he probably needed to find a cheaper place to live though. 

Seagulls

The seagulls have lived here for as long as they can remember. In that collective memory in their little bird brains that goes back many many bird generations. They keep coming back to this cliff to roost. It’s their home and they don’t realise, or care for that matter, that we don’t call it a cliff anymore. They don’t pay attention to us much, only when we drop a stray chip.

Those chips have got more plentiful as the sea has got further away from their home, on what they still think of as their cliff. The food from us has replaced most of the food they used to find in the harbour. We’ve built their new cliffs and changed the name, but the walls of these buildings serve the same purpose for the seagulls regardless of what’s going on inside.

They carry on ignoring us, and for the most part we ignore them right back. But every now and then someone will walk along the street below, and they’ll get a slight whiff of salt air. Pausing for a moment they look around and take in the sky and the weather and think about how close they are to the harbour. Maybe they know that they’re standing where the foreshore used to lie. And very occasionally they might look up and see the gulls and be reminded that while we change some things, others aren’t up to us. 

Bike

Getting there was easy really. All I needed was a few modifications to an old typewriter, some wiring, a battery, and then just get my fixed gear bike up to 88 miles per hour. That was probably the hardest part looking back. Or looking forward I should say. The thing is, I didn’t really plan for any malfunctions, and I wasn’t really equipped to repair my time-bike now that it’d broken down.

Getting up the required speed took me down a steep hill, I chose the road that led to the bridge. I figured that if I didn’t quite get up enough speed I could coast up the bridge and try again later. I’d much rather risk a ticket for riding a bicycle on the motorway than risk hitting a corner at 87 miles per hour. I was quite proud of myself for this forward thinking. I thought I was being sensible by planning ahead. It turns out though, that I should have been planning behind.

The way that my luck would fall, I did get enough speed up to achieve time travel, I was hurtling back in time, down a steep hill in excess of 88 miles per hour and it was only then that I realised the flaw in my plan. My biggest concern shouldn’t have been an escape plan if I didn’t make it. My mind should have been focused on the questionable intention of flying down a nineteen fifties street on a futuristic bicycle with a typewriter tied to the back, combined with wires and electrification that for all intents an purposes looked like a bomb, and having only the fall back of a bridge that wouldn’t be built for another 15 years.

I’m glad I had the presence of mind to hold onto my bike when I was in the water. A more sensible time traveller might have weighed up the risk of drowning and let his time machine sink to the bottom of the harbour, but not me. I don’t know what I’d do now if I didn’t have the hope of potentially repairing my bike and getting back to the… well, getting back to where I came from.

It was a chilly day when I arrived in the past. Luckily I was wearing my beanie despite it having been twenty-five degrees in the future where I’d come from. Dripping with water I had pulled myself up the bank and was assessing the situation when a young man approached me. It’s difficult for me to accurately describe the look that was on his face. I don’t hold it against him, this look he gave me. If I had been minding my own business on a grey autumn day, and all of a sudden a strangely dressed man on a bicycle appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the street and sped into the water, well I think I’d give him a pretty strange look too. To his credit he was very polite under the circumstances.

As it transpires his name is Wilson, and he’s really my only friend now. I guess, given he saw it with his own eyes, he’s the only one that believes me. And I’m very grateful to him for coming to the police station and bailing me out. He had a hard time convincing the constable that I shouldn’t be shipped off to the mental hospital. I’m glad he did convince the constable though, I think it’d be hard to work on my bicycle in an institution.

Wilson is fascinated with my story, I guess my entertainment value is why he agreed to take me in, he’s generously let me stay in his home. I don’t go out anywhere very much. I’ve borrowed some clothes from Wilson but my way of speaking and acting still draws funny looks whenever I have to interact with people. My host has a shed at the end of his long back yard, I spend most of my days in there. When I’m not helping out with the chores around the house, chopping wood and lighting fires, I work on my bike.

I’m fairly confident that the technology I need to get home exists already, it’s just not very widespread and very hard to get hold of. I’ve got a few bits and pieces so far, and I’m trying to improvise others. I don’t really know how long it will take me to get it working again but I’m glad for the focus to keep me going. At least in a decade or so the parts for the typewriter will be commonplace.