Sandy Town

 The beaches of Sandy Town were, naturally, sandy and so Mr Parquette was unsurprised to see footprints in the sand when he arrived at East Beach for his morning perambulation.  What did surprise the middle-aged, somewhat flatulent, gentleman was the depth of the footprints in the sand and the number of toes each foot appeared to have had.  He stopped, though if he were to admit it he was already out of breath and relieved to be able to stop and recuperate, and used the stem of his pipe to gauge the depth of a footprint.

“My word,” he said, with just a hint of a grumble in his voice, “a three inch depth suggests that someone very heavy indeed left these prints!”

Impressed with his own cleverness, and having no-one around to relate this to, he took the trouble to examine the seven-toed footprint more carefully and determined that while the toes were abnormally excessive, somewhat long, and squashed out a little as though the foot were perhaps of sesquipedalian width, they were, more importantly, webbed.

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian and most-famous mother-hater, sat back from her typewriter and re-read what she’d written.  Then she read it again, counting the number of commas that she’d used and wrote that number down in a tiny black notebook she kept for the purpose.  A reviewer, some years ago, had commented on her predilection for punctuation (in that exact phrase) and she now obsessed over proving them wrong.

“Acceptable,” she said to the empty room.  Sunlight came in through the window, though it was weak thanks both to an overcast sky and the sun coming at angle.  By the evening the sun would be round the other side of the house entirely and she would need to light the lamps in the room.  They were the original gas lamps that had come with the house when she’d bought it and had delicate glass covers and little warning labels about ensuring that the carbon monoxide alarm was working properly before lighting the lamp.

“What is?” came a voice from another room.  Janet stiffened, instantly alert to her audience and mentally reviewing what she’d just said.  Then she relaxed again, remembering that her nephew Edward had arrived the previous evening and invited himself to stay for a couple of days.

“I’m writing,” she called back.  “Are you really only just awake?”

Edward walked into the room wearing only boxer shorts.  He was short, hairy and, while not fat exactly, had a little ripple of excess flesh that wobbled gently over the waistband of the blue paisley-patterned shorts.

“Yes, auntie,” he said.  He stretched, raising both arms to the ceiling and revealing bushy armpits that made Janet think of hedgehogs.  “I’m on holiday; I’m hardly going to rise with the pigs and goats now, am I?”

“What pigs and goats?”  Janet’s house was on the outskirts of a medium sized town and was far from rural.  There was a garden of moderate size that she ignored until the neighbours complained and then cut back viciously to the point of exfoliation and a few more rooms than she really knew what to do with but there were certainly no livestock.  Or even pets.

“It’s a saying, auntie,” said Edward.  “How’s the writing going?”

“Put some clothes on,” said Janet.  Her authorial brain was already considering how to use Edward in her novel: all of a sudden she had the idea that Mr Parquette, whose overall aim was the development of a tourist industry for Sandy Town, might open a small safari park and populate it with dwarf gorillas with mange.  “I might have guests later and you in deshabillé would be immodest and unbecoming for a lady of my stature.”

“I thought that was a euphemism for fat?”

“Deshabillé?”  Janet started reaching for her dictionary; an abused book that she wrote corrections in whenever she resorted to looking words up in it.

“Lady of your stature,” said Edward.  He had, unfortunately for him, not spent a lot of time around his aunt and so never saw the dictionary coming.  It hit him spine-first on the nose and between his eyes and he keeled over like a cow in a slaughterhouse.  He hit the floor first and the dictionary followed him and Janet picked the book up and checked it for damage before kicking her nephew in the ribs to see if he’d wake up.

She’d written another page detailing Mr Parquette’s discovery of the footprints and his decision to publicise them in the local paper as belonging to an aquatic form of Bigfoot before Edward stirred, sat up, and rubbed his bruised face.

“Ow,” he said, probing his nose gently with one hand.  “What hit me?”

“Chambers,” said his aunt unapologetically.  “Thirteenth edition.  Also known as the Big Red Book.”

“You threw the book at me?”  Edward snorted, initially with laughter but then with pain.  Blood trickled from one nostril and he wiped it away with his hand.  “Good shot auntie, I suppose, but I’m meeting Deborah Truitt this evening and I think I might just have to call it off.  Do you have a mirror so I can see the damage?”

Janet snorted as well, but tried to convert it into a cough as the name rang a bell for her.  Deborah Truitt was the daughter of Jack Truitt who ran a small independent publishing house and Janet, while having a publisher, wouldn’t say no to having a secondary one for the books her agent refused to handle.

“In the bathroom,” she said.  There were mirrors in almost all the rooms of the house but sending Edward to the bathroom until he put more clothes on seemed both practical and modest.  “I should think Deborah has seen worse that you though, so long as you keep your clothes on around her.”

“Yes, auntie,” said Edward as he picked himself up off the floor and adjusted his boxer shorts so that Janet had to avert her eyes.  “It’s not a Tinder date, you know.”

“A what now?”

“Online dating,” said Edward.  He walked out of the room and then called, “which bathroom?”

“Any of them.  And put some clothes on while you’re in there!”

There was the click of a door closing and Janet looked back at her manuscript.  Yes, a safari park would fit nicely, and perhaps Mr Parquette could try and capture Bigfoot to put them in the park as well.  Only, of course, for Bigfoot to eat his mother after a home invasion….

Janet sighed and tried to scrub the idea from her mind.  She didn’t need any more reviews harking on about the silly idea that she hated all mothers everywhere.