Cliché Ricochet

97... A story about loving someone that you can never have.

   Simultaneously, holes appeared along the top of the cactus body in accordance with the soundtrack editor’s request and although it was a painted paper cut out it was still a cactus.

What was said when the truck backed over the crate of tubed tooth paste in the supermarket loading bay.

   "I was over there on that island on the night of the ordeal’s beginning. It was a mysterious series of events that to this day no one has yet been able to fully interpret in any meaningful way.

Suffice it to say that I am the only one who actually understands the cause and effect of the events in their entirety, despite what the papers say.

   "Most important was the red termite mound at the edge of the under side of the pier in the swamp. But apart from that, turn a card, I’m not telling any more."

   Then he too left the bus, arbitrarily jumping off without checking the location of the stop.

I never saw him again and yet the riddle of that mystery has remained with me to this day, possibly my last on this Earth, so I committed to the Internet all that I can remember my mind was capable of when let loose for a couple of hours a night, for posterity and history, in anonymity, when the train comes back.

   And the memory of these events... Which one day may make sense, like a ring with the catch to its secret chamber found, or a piece of broken, fair-ground shooting gallery prize china leopard, discarded to the tip site and picked out thirty years later from the grey sands between the pampas spears, by a man reliving a childhood memory, and wondering, whether who ever threw it away ever considered, in the flashing instant of that act, whether, ten decades after the tip was closed, that it would be found and placed amongst the tiny rabbit figurines on the mirrored side board?

'No, I never thought that. You never knew. The leopard that had haunted my sleep. I never forgot... and then you were there.'