Free Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & by Anna Tambour Page B

by all of Bede's smarming over him. Coralee felt relieved at the restoration of peacefulness, as the children had been more tiring than she remembered, and now that I finally have nice things ...
    ~
    But that was five years ago already.
    Donna wants to come again, but is needed at home. She has tried for years to convince her folks to visit, but Coralee always says she's too busy, and as to Bede—"I'd be under everyone's feet," he always replies. "Punctured spare tyre." She has almost given up arguing.
    Coralee spends most of her days watching TV and cleaning house, with a spot of gardening. But really, Why bother gardening? she asks Bede—Since no windows look onto it. Somehow, she hasn't made new friends. The neighbours scurry from their cars into their houses so fast that you'd think it's a downpour. The noisy neighbours are the birds. You can hear them on those rare occasions when there's a power failure in town.
    Bede has become a hypochondriac about Snowball. They're a fixture at the vet's office, the plump but otherwise vibrantly healthy middle-aged Snowball sitting bolt-upright and totally self-assured on Bede's lap.
    And since the restoration of Bede's health, he has taught himself to play golf. It only takes Bede a couple of minutes to stroll over three times weekly—his clubs, both of them, thrown like two rifles onto his shoulder.
    He's a funny bugger on the course. Doesn't seem to want a partner. And fanatic about finding the one yellowing ball he always plays. Hits the strangest shots, too. Swinging with a look of enviable control, you'd think maybe he was getting somewhere ... But look at that ball. Never seen anything like it.
    The man sizes up his hole, and then, with a sweep of his club, the ball is suddenly in the air, flying out in what could only be a pear shape sweep of a curve, and—would you credit it, somehow ending up behind the hole.
    And the man is smiling. You see him move his lips the same way every time he swings. Too hard to hear properly even with the hearing aids turned up full blast, but it seems like a whistle, followed by other complicated tweets, all under his breath.
    And this doesn't make any sense—but the stories go that the ball that landed behind the hole doesn't stop there. It rolls slowly forward, now toward the hole, till, at a final sharp whistle, it drops from sight. It doesn't make any more sense than the next old-man's tale: They say he calls his ball Louie.

The It and the Ecstasy
    I put a donkey dropping in my pocket.
It had fungi sprouting from it.
Then I forgot it.
Today I stuck my hand inside it
and found a garden grown all around it.

Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes
    I'm only glad that most of you have never read my story, but for those of you who have, it is a lie without meaning to be, a tragic mistake, a misconception as dangerous to leave uncorrected as that sweet nut in your hand on the way to your mouth, which is really a stone.
    But I should begin at the beginning, in 1870 something by your calendar, when a young Scot gentleman, Robert Louis Stevenson, bought me for the price of 65 francs and a glass of brandy from one Father Adam, a greasy trader who had already torn me from the company of my mother and grandmother two harvests past. The man reeked of his passion: pig sausage that looked just like his own fat runny nose.
    While striking his bargain, Father Adam petted my neck for the first time. At our separation he shed a tear, and the tear made a clean mark down one cheek as he fingered with delight his heavy coins. And although everyone in the village knew the truth about his loving attachment to me, they waved in complicity as my new owner led me away.
     As we rounded the corner, my left ear pointed back to the laughter from where we had been, while my right leaned toward a chortle at my side. "Cheaper than my sleeping sack!" Mr. Stevenson exclaimed, in words that sounded like pebbles rolling down the cobblestones. I felt quite