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  Copyright 2012 Hugh Macnab

  The beach

  It started out as a fairly normal day, until he first noticed Get Lucky that was. With the pale morning sun still low in the grey overcast sky and a gentle breeze ruffling his hair, Shylock strolled aimlessly past MacDonald’s, Nationwide Insurance and Taddingers the house furnishers, as he had many times before - suddenly it was there. If he hadn’t noticed, he would have carried on past Cabinet Doctor and the All Saints Eye Centre. But he did notice and stopped to consider this new discovery - wedged between Taddingers traditional oak-panelled glass-fronted showcase window, and the flaking dark green paint barely covering the dry cracking frontage of the ailing Cabinet Doctor’s.

  It didn’t look at all like either of these neighbouring properties or any of the other shops come to think of it. In fact, it didn’t look like any shop he’d ever seen before.

  The entire shop front consisted of a shear opaque glass wall - like the towering smoked-glass monoliths downtown – only not smoked, more milky white and translucent. No surrounding frame, no contents to view, in fact not even an entrance. It looked more like a bookmark between interesting pages – not meant to be noticed, but serving some purpose none-the-less.

  Shylock rubbed his thumb and fingers across his newly stubbled chin, turned towards the shop, and without pausing to think about it, simply stepped forwards through the shop-front and into the brilliant sunshine.

  The world’s a beach

  The unexpected scale of the panorama suddenly in front of him took him completely by surprise. So much so that he immediately took two steps backwards expecting to reappear on the sidewalk. Instead, he merely stood two steps further back up the beach. Baffled, he turned seeking the glass wall and was puzzled to see merely the same beach. He looked left - the same. Right - the same. Whichever way he looked, he saw the same thing. There was no turning back, and no changing what he could see – a beach!

  He was standing fifty feet or so from water, with a white sandy beach disappearing towards the distant horizon on either side of him. He could hear the waves breaking over some distant reef and rolling towards the shore until, almost dissipated, they lapped gently at the white sand. Gathering himself, he inhaled deeply with the familiar fresh salty ocean air bringing back some of his happier childhood memories as he did so.

  From where he stood the water reflected bright light from the twin gigantic orange orbs suspended overhead in the sky.

  To his right, by peripheral view only, the beach simply continued undisturbed, but to the left in the distance stood a small cluster of white-capped conifers looked oddly out of place, but no more so than the coloured lights strung from them.

  Shaking his head as if to waken himself from a dream, once again he tried to turn and see around him. But, regardless of how he tried, he could only see ahead the single representation of his environment. It was as if someone had placed a picture in front of him and kept it there as he turned around - only ever allowing him to see the same picture. He sat down mystified, to consider where he was and what on Earth was going on – if he was still on Earth.

  After a few moments, and even as he was still considering his predicament, he distractedly scooped up a handful of the pale gritty sand and allowed the fine grains to trickle out gradually between his fingers. Watching them fall he slowly realised that even as they were falling, the marks made on the beach when he scooped them up were already fading. The ridges formed by his fingers slowly but inexorably levelling out until, by the time his hand was empty, they were gone. The small pile of sand that should have been formed by the falling grains didn’t appear either. Instead, it was as if each individual granule shuffled others aside until finally they co-existed comfortably once again and everything was as before. He tried again, this time taking a more determined scoop but with the same result.

  Now thoroughly perplexed, he reached out, took a piece of nearbye driftwood in his hand and threw it into the distance. The flotsam rose spiralling in the air only to fade from view some ten feet away, and without him noticing exactly when, reappearing in it’s original position on the beach at his side. Once more he threw it, and again it reappeared.

  At this point, Shylock was more than confused - he was totally discombobulated, and so absorbed in these small but inexplicable happenings that he actually jumped when a voice interrupted him. ‘Can I help you?’

  Winnie meets the Bounteous Beauty

  The figure in front of him could be no more than three foot tall and hovered a similar distance above the beach. Shylock scrambled back in alarm, not sure what to make of the new apparition.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the surprise visitor repeated, a slight edge of annoyance entering into his tone as if not being used to repeating himself.

  Shylock pushed himself to his feet and looked the figure in the eye - it’s one eye. ‘You’re talking to me?’ he asked, poking a finger in his own chest to emphasise what was actually entirely obvious to everyone – well it would have been had there been anyone else there.

  ‘Do you see anyone else around here?’ asked the floating Goblin-like image.

  ‘Well, er…no,’ admitted Shylock.

  ‘Well then, I must be directing my remarks towards your good self then, mustn’t I?’ the apparition responded.

  ‘I suppose so,’ agreed Shylock, feeling a little stupid.

  The suspended cyclopean shrugged his shoulders and blinked disconcertingly - wiping all expression from his face for that fraction of a second. ‘So, now that we – the two of us that is – you and I – have ascertained that it is us – we, who are communicating with each other, can I have your answer to my question, or must I hang around here all day? I’m missing the highlight of a great ballgame at home just to come and find out what you want.’

  ‘Well, don’t miss your ballgame on my behalf shorty!’ retorted Shylock, annoyed.

  ‘Charmed I'm sure! Just be like that,’ said the floating shape, huffily. ‘And for future reference, I prefer vertically-challenged, if you don’t mind. I find the term shorty derogatory and frankly, offensive. I’ll see you around.’ With that he was gone in the blink of his one eye, just as mysteriously as when he’d first arrived.

  Not ‘gone’ in any traditional sense of the word, he just disappeared – and even that description didn’t feel right to Shylock. Like the vanishing marks in the sand, and although he couldn’t explain why, it felt more like his vertically-challenged visitor had never been there in the first place.

  Confused, Shylock realised that without his unexpected visitor, he was alone in this strange place and began to worry. ‘Hey! Where are you?’ he shouted, a hint of panic edging his tone. ‘Where have you gone?’

  ‘Where you can’t bother me, or be rude to me either’ replied the familiar voice, drifting back lazily out of the everywhere and nowhere-specific.

  ‘Look,’ said Shylock, trying to sound as reconciliatory as possible. ‘I’m sorry if you found shorty offensive. I was upset. It’s just a word, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just a name.’

  Silence.

  ‘People call me names all the time and I don’t take offence,’ Shylock tried a second time.

  ‘Like what?’ asked the disembodied voice, unable to disguise the underlying interest.

  ‘You know,’ hedged Shylock, regretting his admission.

  ‘No, I don’t know? What sort of names?’ the voice insisted.

  ‘Well, they used to call me …a scaredy cat,’ said Shylock, surprising himself with the blunt honesty of his reply.

  ‘Scaredy cat! You get upset simply because they call you a scaredy cat! You should try being a one-eyed gnarled midget!’

  ‘I never called you a one-eyed gnarled midget,’ Shylock repudiated.

  ‘
It was just a matter of time,’ the voice floated back. ‘You’d get there soon enough!’

  ‘No I wouldn’t!’ Shylock denied. ‘That’s not fair. Just because I used one single word you didn’t like, you’re accusing me of things I haven’t said.’

  ‘Yet!’ finished the vertically-challenged interrogator, assuredly.

  Shylock bit back his retort, slumped back down on the beach and stared distractedly at the sand at his feet. Not at all sure what was going on, it seemed that silence was perhaps the safest course. Using the moment’s peace, he tried to recall the details of the form behind the voice. About half his own height and seriously …substantially proportioned – at least as wide as he wasn’t tall, Shylock chuckled to himself. It seemed that whatever facet of the apparition he was to describe, he would be faced with being offensive. Short, fat, scruffily dressed and the only word he could use to describe the one-eyed, large red warty-nosed, puck-marked,