Today’s prompt: “You run into two strangers arguing over something. What do you do?”
Today’s music: Tension, by David Sanya Beats. 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud.
A Small Disagreement
Even in magical towns, things can go to shit. It’s more about the level than whether it smells or not.
Breakfast was interrupted. I was enjoying the pub’s spread: good grilled sausages from Mike’s Meats, a heaping helping of scrambled eggs, rustic toast with pumpkin seeds, and a side of mushrooms that didn’t try to take over the plate by right of sovereignty. I’d made it halfway through a coffee and about a quarter through the plate when urgent barking drew my attention. It was odd to hear anything disruptive at all, as if the entire hamlet had some sort of noise-cancelling headphone effect going on, but not today.
I wondered if I could see what was going on. If Hollis wanted help, well… maybe I could give it here. And the thing about helping is that you can’t schedule it into Outlook: people can’t predict when drama strikes their lives.
Drama, in this case, was Maxwell. He was Sam’s Hairy Maclary dog, and we’d gotten to know each other quite well last night over a stick. Maxwell was barking and running around like a lunatic. There were two strange vehicles in the market square—not that I knew every person or vehicle in Hearthlight, but I hadn’t seen either the man, the woman, or their vehicles before.
The two vehicles had hit each other. One, a small VW Beetle in a bright cerulean blue, had T-boned a much larger truck. The truck looked like it had tried some evasive manoeuvres, failed, and managed to make everything worse by driving over the bench I liked to sit at. The two drivers—a man in strong linen coveralls and a peaky blinder, and a woman in a lavender summer dress—had managed to get out of their vehicles, but then the truck failed a second test of engineering and dumped its load on them.
The truck’s contents were baked goods—cupcakes, muffins, full-blown cakes, pies, and was that a quiche I saw?—and Maxwell was going absolutely insane, trying to evade capture by the overalls-clad man while also trying to eat as much cake as possible. I could certainly empathise, because I was partial to cake, but I preferred it served on a plate, not on the road. The woman in the summer dress was trying to remove pieces of cake from herself, the man, and the road, but this was Mission Impossible because there was a lot of cake. As the pair waded through the wreckage, Maxwell entering a level of sugar rush I’d not observed since the Fairy Bread incident at a two-year-old’s party I’d guested at, I noticed Sam. He was skulking on the verge of Trudy’s gelato store, perhaps having gone in there for an ice cream. My brain, used to dealing with executives, didn’t have much trouble threading the needle on the dog escaping, running through the square, the VW swerving to avoid it, the truck swerving to avoid the VW, and then the bench taking it right in the neck, so to speak.
Well, then. Hollis definitely wasn’t here, and I didn’t think this was really his kind of problem to fix. I strolled toward the pair. They both had red faces, flushed in anger or embarrassment, and no one seemed to notice when I picked up a stray muffin. I held it low so Maxwell could see it, then deftly tossed it toward Trudy’s store. Maxwell, nobody’s fool and keen to secure the uncontested baked good, accelerated to light speed after it. Sam, probably not a fool, but also only ten, grabbed Maxwell’s leash and vanished like a Godsgrave assassin.
The wrath of the gods averted, I cleared my throat. Both drivers stopped waving their arms at each other but looked on the brink of waving them at me. I tried on my best Nathan Fillion smile and said, “This looks like a spot of bother. I’d love to help clean it up, but I hate to work before coffee. Can I interest either of you in a cup? Then we’ll get this fixed up.”
Roll result? One high-speed muffin chase, two icing-covered strangers, and a public bench that gave its life in service of narrative tension.
XP gained: 1 mauled cupcake, 1 diffused disaster, and a small-town crisis averted with a side of charm.
If Hearthlight’s gentle panic made you smile, you can throw a few sprinkles my way here (ones that aren’t road-flavoured):
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