Les Règles du Jour by Mark Young

It’s one of those days when you’d like to go out & kick a ball around the yard. Only. You don’t have a yard. So.

It’s one of those days when, if you had a yard, you’d like to go out & kick a ball around in it. But.

Since you’ve opened the gate to your imagination, balls & yards become too commonplace to consider. So.

It’s one of those days when you’d like to get in the car & go off driving around the countryside. Only. You’ve seen most of it, & the places you haven’t are along or at the end of roads that are so basic that you wouldn’t drive them anyway, especially when it’s been raining for the past few days & you’d need an all-terrain vehicle to negotiate them. & anyway.

You have this thing about ATVs & SUVs because they’re mainly driven by redneck country boys or men with small dicks – actually the first is merely a qualifier for the second, or vice versa – or by mothers who’d rather run their children over outside the schoolgates instead of taking them home. So.

You think about other forms of transport, planes or balloons. But. This is a small airport, & to get anywhere you really want to go would involve long stopovers at various transit points, which is time that would be better spent kicking a ball around the yard if you had a yard to kick the ball around in. &.

You’ve already been up in a balloon, & the memory of it is so exhilarating that you don’t really want to go up again & perhaps spoil that memory. So.

You stay where you are. &.

Get bored with that. So.

Since you haven’t got a ball to kick around & a yard to kick it around in you go to the chest of drawers & get out a balled pair of socks & go outside to kick it around on the roadway. Where.

You get run over by the postman who, since he hasn’t anything to deliver to you today, is staying on the road instead of driving along the footpath. Or.

You get run over by a small-dicked redneck boy in an ATV who has decided to prove the point that size isn’t everything & that the red neck comes from toiling in the sun which is where it comes from anyway except he’s too stupid to know that. Or.

You get run over by a mother in an SUV who is in a hurry to get to the school in time to run over her children. Or.

All three come along at once, & you score an own goal.

*****

Mark Young's most recent books are Bandicoot habitat & lithic typology, both from gradient books of Finland. An e-book, For the Witches of Romania, is due out from Beard of Bees.