Symptoms of Poor Planning
A solitary five bar gate, left swinging open, drummed the rhythm of the wind against its latch. It marked the entrance to the car park of Chartwig Forest, a beautiful, ancient woodland which was so named for its remarkable habit of burning down at a moment's notice. It was seventy percent deciduous, twenty-five percent coniferous, and, for reasons that eluded contemporary ecology, five percent ferrous. Sited oddly centrally in the small to medium sized town of Silwhim, which sat in the sweet spot between a major city and the ocean, it was a blanket of green that had been draped over a softly undulating patch of hills and valleys. Whether this blanket served to keep the hills warm, or just to hide them from those who might seek to make the whole world flat, is, as yet, unknown.
Beyond the gate, parked with expert indifference over three spaces, was the car of Gary Buick. The man himself was no longer in the vehicle. He had abandoned it in order to set about the business of his pleasant daytime walk through Chartwig Forest, and was already proceeding through the pedestrian gate into the woodland proper. This gate, too, was swinging freely in the gentle breeze that played from tree to tree, occasionally clunking into the wooden signpost that read: "Gate to be kept closed at all times. Maximum penalty: loss of right to have a roof – Silwhim Parish Council"
Despite this stern warning of fearsome retribution, Gary followed his own instinct that he couldn’t be bothered to close the gate. Clearly, the threat of the Parish was nothing to him.
In the early days of Silwhim, the Parish Council had not been much of a seat of power. They’d organised ill-fated fetes, posted unnoticed notices, and engaged in passive-aggressive combat over who had really booked the church hall first. That all changed when they had the bright idea to take an advisory, supervisory, and always visor-free role in deciding the usage of land parcels within the parish; specifically, those which were smaller than Tricia Barring's home. The sitting members of the Silwhim Parish Council would have been the first to acknowledge that, although actually perfectly reasonable, this might seem like an odd and somewhat arbitrary line to draw in the sand regarding their remit. At the time of its proposal as a threshold for Parish Council involvement, they themselves had each questioned its origins, sending queries to the remote chairwoman of the council who had proposed the motion in the first place. All records of Parish Council meetings from the era of this decision were perfectly transparent in their details, explaining completely adequately how each of the questions posed to the chairwoman, whose name was recorded variously as Patricia B., Mrs Barring, and Chairwoman Tricia, were answered to their satisfaction. There were footnotes to the effect that the coincidental naming was a source of much amusement to the sitting members, and a vote was held on the matter.
From that unanimously favourable vote onwards, the Silwhim Parish Council took an active role in even the most pedestrian matters of land usage, from denying Mr Smedley the right to have a gazebo in his garden over the summer, to ordering Ms Ullford to tear down her front wall, on account of her failing to put the bins out in good time one Wednesday morning. Not a driveway could be washed, nor a cat chased from the garden, nor a dying young man be offered CPR outside of a permanent structure, without the Parish Council demanding a say in the matter first. Despite the lack of any legal authority, they nevertheless managed to exert an almost crippling degree of control over the lives of the people of Silwhim. All, as they say, was well.
Onwards marched the intrepid Gary, covering ground as best he could and drawing deep, luxurious lungfuls of forest air. Nothing really calmed him like the smell of a woodland, which is to say, marginally. Gary was not the kind of person to whom calmness came naturally, and although woodland was the best source of relaxation he'd thus far discovered in his tawdry and drab life, it still failed to constitute a meaningful sedative. Through his mind still raced the possibilities of climbing every limb in reasonable jumping distance, racing along the path to get the walk completed more quickly, or throwing his shoes as far as could and then trying to beat that record. Nonetheless, he was committed to trying to bring his energy levels down. He did his best to regard the serenity of the sunrays that filtered through leafy canopies above, and to smell the various pollens that were carried on the air. Gary listened for the rustling of squirrels in the undergrowth, and to birdsong that chirruped out from places unseen. He even made a solid attempt at closing his eyes and losing himself in the moment, but this didn't interact well with his refusal to keep walking. If anything, the consistent stumbling and falling only made him less serene.
With the utter failure of these techniques for relaxation, Gary felt just about ready to give up on the exercise of a rejuvenating amble and have a high intensity walk through the woods instead. His acceleration to break-neck strolling pace was, however, disrupted when a mass of bright colour caught his eye.
This distraction was what finally proved enough to not only slow him down, but actually bring him to a full stop. Standing in front of him was a tree unlike any other, somewhat apart from other trees and far more ostentatious in its colouration. Where they had all adopted the generally-agreed-upon green of a summer woodland, varying only in hue and saturation, this tree trod the path less travelled. A loner, much like the man regarding it, this tree featured bright, blood reds, sunshine yellows, sky blues, royal blues, treasonous oranges, and even Cadbury's purple.
Gary stood and drank in the prismatic beauty of the unknown tree ahead of him, marvelling that nature could produce something so wild. Nature, of course, was also marvelling, because it had not produced this tree at all. It had a hand in the building blocks of the monument to colour and arbour, but the credit and blame sat variously at the feet of the Parish Council.
The matter of how their remit was defined, vis. Tricia Barring's abode, was of little consequence to the mysterious Patricia B. after it had been agreed upon. She never once attended a meeting or answered any message after that interaction, nor would she contribute anything to the annual Christmas tombola. It seemed that her sole concern had been to ensure that Tricia Barring, of no presumed relation, would never be bothered by the same busybodies that had been set loose on the rest of Silwhim, and she was apparently contented to leave council matters in the hands of her sitting fellows. Tricia Barring, however, had not considered how her own actions might take a terrible toll on the town.
Over the years, Tricia Barring's estate steadily grew, as she bought up the land around her home and used them for pig farms, fracking, and other wholesome summer activities. The Parish Council could not, and indeed would not, interfere with her business by definition; they were too busy punishing Mr Trellis for walking on a stretch of pavement that had been zoned for skipping only. They did, however, have time at the start of every Parish Council meeting to verify the size of Tricia Barring's home before they decided where their meddling would be best placed.
Ever so gradually, but ever so consistently, the size of Tricia Barring's home grew, and with it grew the undeserved power of the Parish Council. Where previously they were capable only of ruining the lives of the individual, it was increasingly within their ability to inflict top grade inconveniences on whole businesses, making reckless and hard to parse demands with ultimatums that, at their most generous, were already in the past. Tricia Barring was always safe, but she was the only one.
It had been long established within the Silwhim Parish council that power corrupts; after all, the tiny modicum of perceived power with which the council had started had already led to each councillor burning bridges, figuratively and literally, with their friends and neighbours. Power and corruption spiralled hand-in-hand, ever upwards, until the town of Silwhim was merely a chessboard, on which each councillor could inflict devastatingly petty wounds on the lives of their colleagues.
Ms Harrol's chiminea was producing more smoke than Mr Peters would have liked on a springtime evening, and so, rather than simply revoke authorisation for all the cement in her driveway as he would have done previously, he supported planning permission for a chemical processing plant behind her home, upwind in the prevailing direction. Likewise, Mrs Travis took issue with Mr Peters making such a decision without consulting her, and therefore gave her backing to a plan for Mary Marghoul's Mutagens and Crochet Emporium to dispose of their waste mutagenic material in Mr Peters' garden.
Unfortunately for the town of Silwhim, Ms Harrol and Mr Peters both lived in properties that backed onto Chartwig Forest, as did many other victims of chemical-effusion based spite. The impact surveys on local wildlife, it is fair to say, left a lot to be desired.
The leaves of Gary's exciting tree were tipped with white, yellow and red, nature's warnings that perhaps it was best left alone. Unfortunately for both the tree and young Gary, he never had been very good at taking advice when it was offered. Nor when it was thrust upon him, thrown in his face, used as a threat or, in this case, broadcast from thousands of tiny, living danger signs.
Gary was, not to put too fine a point on it, a free actor. This is notably different from a free thinker, because such a title necessarily presupposes that one does at least some non-zero quantity of thinking. A free actor, on the other hand, simply acts, regardless of what factors have or have not been considered.
As was so very often the case with Gary, the amount of thought put into this situation was small. Vanishingly small, in fact. It was the kind of amount that, if placed in a jar, would lead to that jar being declared 'finished' and placed alongside the washing up. Rattling around like a mote of dust in the finished jar that passed for Gary's mind, was the notion that these brightly coloured leaves were awfully pretty, alongside several low-level, subconscious thoughts about how to lift one's hand and grab them most satisfyingly.
Seeing no danger, whether or not it was within the field of view, Gary's adventurous mind immediately disregarded the gentle, single fingered prod technique, as well as the delicate finger and thumb pinch method. These were the actions of cowards and of those who saw any need for caution, a word which Gary could barely define; what little he did know of it led him to believe it was a synonym for 'boring'. Instead, he opted for the toddler's dual-fistful method, grasping indiscriminately at the polychromatic suite of warnings and accepting whatever he got as a good outcome.
Almost as quickly as he'd thrown a hand into the foliage, Gary snatched it away again. The results of his experiment were clear. He had determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that the thin, spiny protrusions on the edges of the crinkled leaves were indeed thin spines, and the soreness of his hand would not let him forget that. Cursing that there had been absolutely no way to tell ahead of time that grabbing the tree was a bad idea, he took another look at the traitorous tree. On closer inspection of the bark, which glinted with iron fragments like many of the trees in Chartwig Forest, he noticed that there was a pattern embossed into it. It was clearly a natural pattern grown by the tree, but it bore an uncanny resemblance to an open human hand, circled and with a line through it.
“Bizarre." he muttered to himself. A tingling sensation around the site of the spines drew his fickle attention down to the hand that had suffered the most. To feel some amount of tingling there seemed perfectly above board and normal, given the circumstances, as did the redness. In his vast experience of puncturing his hands on easily avoided hazards, Gary knew that this was well within expectation. Shortly afterwards, his fingers started to swell up, which wouldn't have been much of an issue if his palm hadn't also started to swell down, shrinking in size until it made his digits look like gargantuan articulated sausages.
"Oh. It seems to have given me small palms. That's... er..." Gary said to himself, peering down at his redistributed hand mass. "Hm."
He gazed in an intent and quite understandable manner for some time, standing there next to the offending tree. He wasn’t worried, per se, just very interested in how events might proceed from that point. If his palms were going to eventually disappear, leaving him with nothing but fingers and a thumb connected to his arm at the wrist, then he’d have a lot of work to do. Aside from learning how to perform basic tasks without the primary source of hand area, there were dozens of gloves that would need heavy modification. That sort of work took a lot of free time, and Gary wasn’t confident that he could commit to doing it all before the winter. Especially not when he was trying to get used to his new hands.
"Are you alright? You know that you're not supposed to be in there, don't you?" asked an apparently concerned dog walker, standing on the path while their dog sat patiently at heel.
"Am I not?"
“No. There are loads of signs on this post and rail fence saying 'No Entry, even for authorised personnel'.”
Gary frowned in thought for a moment.
"Oh yeah. I do recall vaulting that, now that you mention it. And then I vaulted back because the original vaulting made me drop my phone. And then I was tired, so I smashed the padlock off the gate with that rock.” On cue, in the wind, the gate screeched on its hinges in the breeze, fragments of broken padlock and chain adding a metallic rattle. “Funny the things you forget, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is. Just this morning I forgot that I already had a teabag in my mug and nearly made a double bagger with breakfast! What are we like?” chuckled the dog walker. There was an impatient growling from below. “Well, I can see that you're busy and you're chatting happily so you must be fine, so I won't keep you any longer. See you later."
"Yeah, OK. Enjoy your walk, bye." said Gary. He’d always found, whenever anyone said that they wouldn’t keep him any longer, that it was they themselves who wished not to be kept. It was a rare example of something that you could say to yourself on someone else’s behalf, and no-one would question it. To accentuate that he was accepting this declaration of self-emancipation, Gary gave what would normally be a small wave. His enormous fingers, however, rendered that goal rather difficult to achieve, and he ended up giving a malformed, medium-sized wave instead.
With their dog leading the way bravely, cutting a serpentine route across the footpath in pursuit of all the most interesting smells and least edible objects, the dog walker disappeared into the depths of the woodland, leaving Gary alone once again. Quietly, in the back of his mind, some primal part of his brain tried to connect the dots between ignoring warning signs, leaping over physical boundaries, and then getting hurt. It was sure that there was some underlying connection there, some causal link from which it could learn and avoid harm in future, but nothing immediately became clear. He gave up on the notion.
Having satisfied himself that his hands had reached a steady state in terms of finger-to-palm ratio, and feeling relieved that his feet were not following suit, Gary decided that it might be best to wander back to his car. On a whim he decided to keep a clipping of the very interesting tree, partly because it might aid a future diagnosis, and partly because he might find some future need for having hands of this particular shape. This course of action was, it transpired, incredibly easy to carry out, because several of the needle-edged leaves were still stuck in his sleeves and the flesh of his hands. It was a source of great satisfaction to Gary that he wouldn’t have to expend additional effort in carrying a clipping, and counted his blessings for such good fortune.
As a responsible adult man, Gary exited the secure compound in which he’d found the interesting tree, and propped the gate shut using the padlock-bashing rock. Thusly having satisfied himself that the compound was one hundred percent secure again, he started to pace along the woodland path once more.
Although he had been pleased to note that the symptoms in his hands had ceased to develop, Gary was disappointed to discover his chest feeling a little tight. It wasn’t so tight that he couldn’t draw breath, but the exertion of a gentle walk was, apparently, now a little greater than it had been previously.
“Venom is quite bad for you, I guess.” he muttered to himself, astutely, rubbing at his solar plexus with a thumb the size of an aubergine. It didn’t do much to relieve the pressure he was feeling in his airways. In fact, the longer he walked and the more he massaged, the more it felt like a solid obstruction had appeared within his airways. Gary rolled his eyes, with a totally undeserved ‘just my luck’ attitude.
A loud snort and sudden scraping snapped Gary’s attention up from his chest and towards the puffing face of a horse, looking him dead in the eye with ears held forward. With a wheeze, Gary brought himself to a sudden stop and looked into the curious chestnut face of his new equine acquaintance.
“Hello there. What brings you into the woods, horse friend?” Gary managed, before doubling over into a fit of hacking coughs.
“Just a pleasant day to ride through… are you alright?” replied a woman’s voice. Gary had never expected a horse to sound like that, but in the absence of any other direct evidence of horse speech he had no solid grounds on which to refute the notion. Although he wanted to reply to the miraculous speaking animal, he was still too busy coughing. “Do you need some help?”
Gary held up a hand to reassure and placate the horse, indicating that he had this whole blocked-airway business totally under control, but a gasp reminded him that his hands didn’t currently scream ‘this is a well man’.
“I’m fine…” he coughed. “… totally fine. Just a bit of a cough.” Finally regaining some control over himself, he drew a deep breath and stood up straight again to get a better look at the talking horse. It looked fairly ordinary, except for the leather straps across its face and metal hanging from either side of its mouth. Wondering if this was a mechanism to take words from its mouth up to a broadcast system, Gary followed two further lines of leather from the metal up to a woman, sitting on a saddle on the horse’s back and looking concerned.
“Oh, hello. You don’t have a talking horse after all, my mistake.” Gary observed. Given that the woman was dressed from head to toe in fluorescent pink, yellow and orange, and practically mummified in reflective strips, it was impressive that he had been able to miss her. Far from ‘high visibility’, she had reached the heights of being uncomfortably visible and was probably the primary source of light in the woodland.
“Erm, no. Although he talks to me in his own way.” she said, with a level of diplomacy that Gary probably didn’t deserve. The horse stretched its head forwards to sniff at Gary.
“Yeah?” asked Gary, as politely as he could, before another fit of coughs. “I just got prickled by a bush and I think I’m allergic to it or something. Does your horse need something?”
The horse’s nose was, by this point, getting fully involved in every pocket that it could see around Gary’s person, sniffing optimistically at each one, lest it contain a bale of hay that might otherwise go unnoticed. When it poked him in the chest, testing for hidden compartments that might contain a bag of apples, the pressure tipped Gary over the edge into one, final, enormous expulsion of air from his lungs. Air was not the only thing that had been expelled, however.
Much to Gary’s confusion, the rider’s horror, and the horse’s delight, Gary had coughed out three whole carrots, which landed on the path in front of him in a neat bouquet.
“Oh dear. I seem to have carrot-lung.” Gary surmised immediately. The rider was unavailable for comment, struggling as she was to prevent the horse from devouring the biologically questionable carrots. Moving his feet out of desperation more than necessity, the horse danced backwards and forwards in a short arc, pulling and straining at the bridle in an attempt to have an impromptu woodland feast.
“They came out of a person! Stop it!” protested the rider, knowing in her heart of hearts that her horse was not in a mood to would listen to reason. It was easy to know that, because her horse was never in a mood to listen to reason.
Given that the horse and rider were taking up much of the path with their dance of wills, all Gary could really do was stand and wait, occasionally bringing up another carrot. Eventually, the pair of them reached some kind of inscrutable accord, the fancy hoof-work ceased, and the horse satisfied itself by launching a thorough investigation of Gary himself. While the floor carrots were out of bounds, a confusing notion in and of itself considering where carrots usually grew, there might be other root vegetables ensconced around Gary’s body that were fair game.
“Sorry about that. He gets a bit worked up sometimes. Is it normal for you to cough carrots out?”
“I wouldn’t say normal… this is probably the… well…” Gary looked upwards “… first time it’s happened, I’d say.”
A slightly damp nose bashed Gary’s face. The horse was not concerning itself with matters of personal space any longer, instead employing his most powerful investigative tools of sniffing, snorting, sneezing and snuffling around any pockets it could. Quite honestly, a lot of equine investigation depends heavily on the nose, and on verbs starting with ‘sn’.
“Perhaps you should get yourself home then, or to a doctor. Or if they turn out to be safe, you could move into wholesale for a grocer’s I suppose.” surmised the rider.
“Yes, I think so. I am on my way home now, in fact.”
“I won’t keep you any longer then. Walk on, Porcelain. Nice to meet you, sir, and I hope that you get better soon.”
Coughing out one final distraction carrot by way of reply, Gary lifted a hand to wave goodbye and then, once the coast was clear of any equine investigators, proceeded again.
Progress back through the woods was, it pained Gary to admit, going more slowly than his initial advance. Partly this was the encounter with a horse, but other extenuating circumstances included frequent pauses to vent root vegetables from his lungs, and general distraction about the state of his hands. It was around this time that Gary started to doubt whether he’d done the right thing by coming to the woods that day. If anything, he felt less calm than when he’d started, and he’d have a tough time lighting any scented candles now that his fingers were each the size of paint tin.
During the course of his lamentations about the ill-fated walk on which he had come, Gary gradually started to feel somehow lighter. It wasn’t a figurative lightness of spirits, because a sense of concern still weighed heavily over him, but a literal easing of the pressure between his feet and the ground. His legs were just as tired as they had been before, but the burden on them had been eased. The burning sensation in his palm was also feeling a little cooler, but his trousers had started to flap as if they were caught in a gale. In all of his experience of getting easily avoidable infections, Gary had never known the symptoms to spread to his clothing, least of all in such a way as to grant them the power of motion.
Looking down to gather more precious data about the situation, Gary was a little surprised to note that dust and debris from the forest floor was skittering away from him, as if caught in the downdraft of a helicopter, or improperly directed hairdryer.
“Pedestrian!” shouted someone from the path ahead, once again distracting Gary from his ruminations on the local wind conditions. It seemed that the shout had come from a person who was more Lycra than man. A sleek, aerodynamic helmet was attached by chin straps to his bonce, fingerless gloves provided partial protection to his hands, and a bicycle splattered with fresh mud from somewhere secret in the bone dry woodland was beneath him. Behind, a whole flotilla of other cyclists, forming a rainbow of skin-tight clothing and sunglasses, concertinaed together as their impressive momentum was arrested.
“Hi, thanks.” Gary said, lifting a hand in gratitude at not being stampeded by the spandex bandits. This movement, however, proved more aggressive than he’d anticipated.
Like a lovingly stacked display of tins at a supermarket being felled by the careless charge of a toddler at ramming speed, the collection of cyclists was suddenly scattered. Those who fell did so immediately, creating a trip hazard for the masses, while those who kept their feet & wheels were propelled backwards in shaky, chaotic trajectories by the fearsome hurricane winds emanating from Gary’s teeny tiny palm.
“Wind!” one of the cyclists shouted, nobly trying to maintain the courtesy of warning her companions of perils, but it was something of a redundant exercise.
Shocked by both his incredible power and development in general, Gary looked into his palm in fascination, giving himself a fierce and unpleasant wind-boarding in the process. Stopping narrowly short of pulling his eyelids back over his skull, Gary pointed the palm back down at the floor again, generating enough lift to rest his legs a little.
“Sorry! Sorry!” he called to the panting and uneasy fleet of bicycle enthusiasts, some of whom had suffered grazing wounds that might take days to heal. “I didn’t realise that I was, uh, creating winds.”
“How could you not notice that happening? I’d definitely know if I was generating weather from my hands.” someone replied from the writhing morass of cyclists on the ground.
“There was the time your handlebars looked as if it had been raining, Tarquin.” another observed.
“That was just sweat because I was pushing beyond my normal limits.”
“Pretty sure there was a high pressure system moving into your hands, Tarq. It came with a general suppression of air temperature, remember?”
“That was a coincidence.” he argued, without being terribly convincing.
“Alright, but what about when the area around Clarissa’s handlebars was perfectly still and temperate, when it was raining everywhere else.”
“Yeah, I can’t explain that.” replied the presumable Clarissa. She had managed to stay upright, but was lodged between two trees and trying to gently extract herself.
“Had you been prickled by the colourful tree down there?” Gary asked, excitedly.
“No idea. It was a windy day in autumn though, so anything could have blown over the path.”
“You also had that hand-cover on though. It’s like a huge plastic bubble in which the handlebars are enshrouded, so that the hands can stay warm and dry while you achieve break-neck speeds.” someone who had been blown a good thirty metres back down the path explained. They seemed all too comfortable with shouting in the otherwise tranquil woodland.
“I see. Maybe not then. Either way, I’m sorry.” Gary reiterated.
“Not to worry, chum. Things like this happen.” said Clarissa. She paused for a moment. “I mean, I guess they must happen because they just did, but it’s not really that frequent.”
“It smelled like a pine air freshener.” added Tarquin, apparently calmed by his companions. “Which is a bit weird. Not more weird than you having windy hands in the first place, but still remarkable.”
“Yeah, I thought that as well. I must have a coniferous infection.” Gary decided. There was general assent from the cyclists, most of whom were now upright again and ready to proceed. “I won’t keep you any longer.” he said, desperate not to be kept by them any longer and stepping off the path.
“Will you keep your hands down while we go past, please?” asked someone in violet and lime lycra. “I just don’t really fancy being thrown into a tree.”
“No problem.” Gary agreed, locking his arm into his side and feeling the wind tear at his trousers again.
“Actually, you could point it our way as we go, if you’re willing?” suggested Tarquin. “Be nice to have a tail wind for a bit.”
“You know what, it’s the least I can do under the circumstances.”
“Great, thanks very much. Have a good day.” Tarquin said, leaning onto his pedals and slowly rolling into motion once more. A general burble of gratitude and goodbyes came from the rest of the brigade as they cycled past and, when the final one had rolled on by, Gary let them have it with both hands. Under the sudden and violent acceleration from behind, the cyclists disappeared at lightning speeds into the depths of the wood, leaving Gary alone once more.
Angling his hands slightly down and backwards, he was able to make much more expeditious progress along the path back to the car park, thanks to jet propulsion. It was a matter of mere minutes before, with no further interruptions by other users of the woods, he made it back in view of his car. It appeared as if someone else had taken the time to close the gate after themselves, like a real dogsbody, so Gary made sure to prop it open with another rock. Parish council threats be damned, poor gate etiquette had got him into this situation so it was only reasonable to assume it would get him out of it too.
It was something of a trial to get his keys out of his pocket. The powerful gale from his palm first inflated the trouser leg like a hot air balloon, which made things easier, but without anywhere to go the air pocket started to work against him, holding his hand away from the very keys he sought to grab. Even when he managed to make progress, the winds pushed the keys themselves further away, driving them into the flesh of his leg.
“This is annoying.” he said to himself, withdrawing the hand for the time being and blowing air onto the car park surface in the process. A tornado of small gravel shards was whipped up, wreaking a terrible toll on the paintwork and mirrors of a hatchback parked nearby. Gary was unconcerned.
Several experimental techniques of key retrieval followed, including blowing the keys from the other side of the pocket, jumping up and down a lot, and even just shouting at them to get the heck out, but none worked. The whole exercise seemed fruitless, and Gary was on the cusp of giving up and simply removing the garment, when his eyes started to feel peculiar. He tried to focus on something close by, his wristwatch, and found that while he could see it sharply enough, the hands seemed to be running too quickly. In fact, they were accelerating. Then, he saw his arm relax down to the ground, sending up a spray of debris that flew directly at his face, but felt nothing.
Wondering if his senses had taken to simple lying, Gary felt his arm, which looked like it was down but felt like it was up, relax to his side. Then, without seeing a single thing coming, a twig struck him on the face. Reeling from the impact, Gary’s eyes then told him that he was lying down on the ground, lifting his legs into the air, and gently shaking his keys out. Still feeling himself standing, he watched on with mixed emotions has he pinched the keys between the backs of his hands, thus keeping them safe from the winds, and entered the car.
This dissonance between his senses was not a welcome development. As far as everything except sight told Gary, he was standing stock still in a car park, but his eyes claimed that he was now back inside the car, looking at the internal clock. It read a clear half an hour ahead of what his watch had said.
It took a lot of quiet pondering, eye scrunching and mental gymnastics for Gary to parse what his senses were telling him, but finally an epiphany reached him.
“Oh…” he said, for the benefit of no-one else, for he was alone in the car park. “I think I have time-sight. I’m seeing the future. That’s going to make driving a real pig, even though I will apparently get my keys back at some stage.”
Trying to formulate a plan of action, Gary stood in quiet contemplation for a long while. Seeing through time was a lot to take in, especially when he was trying to come to terms with it while his eyes made wild claims that he was turning the keys and driving away. All he could do for some time was watch the show as he pulled out of the car park, cut someone up on a quiet residential road, and tailgated a bus. Finally, after witnessing himself cut across a village green to avoid a pothole, he decided that contemplation and watching himself silently drive was achieving nothing, so he might as well go through the motions of getting his keys out and sit in the car. Gary felt himself lie down and, much more slowly than he’d seen events unfold, he jiggled about until he heard keys clatter to the dirt beside him. Working remarkably well from memory alone, he grabbed the keys blindly with his backhands and entered the car, all the while seeing himself mount the kerb outside his house, post the car key through his letter box, and then enter through the front door.
With hope in his heart that he would work out why those things had happened in about half an hour, Gary started his car and made his way home, ready to sleep off the perfectly normal symptoms from which he was suffering.
Beyond the gate, parked with expert indifference over three spaces, was the car of Gary Buick. The man himself was no longer in the vehicle. He had abandoned it in order to set about the business of his pleasant daytime walk through Chartwig Forest, and was already proceeding through the pedestrian gate into the woodland proper. This gate, too, was swinging freely in the gentle breeze that played from tree to tree, occasionally clunking into the wooden signpost that read: "Gate to be kept closed at all times. Maximum penalty: loss of right to have a roof – Silwhim Parish Council"
Despite this stern warning of fearsome retribution, Gary followed his own instinct that he couldn’t be bothered to close the gate. Clearly, the threat of the Parish was nothing to him.
In the early days of Silwhim, the Parish Council had not been much of a seat of power. They’d organised ill-fated fetes, posted unnoticed notices, and engaged in passive-aggressive combat over who had really booked the church hall first. That all changed when they had the bright idea to take an advisory, supervisory, and always visor-free role in deciding the usage of land parcels within the parish; specifically, those which were smaller than Tricia Barring's home. The sitting members of the Silwhim Parish Council would have been the first to acknowledge that, although actually perfectly reasonable, this might seem like an odd and somewhat arbitrary line to draw in the sand regarding their remit. At the time of its proposal as a threshold for Parish Council involvement, they themselves had each questioned its origins, sending queries to the remote chairwoman of the council who had proposed the motion in the first place. All records of Parish Council meetings from the era of this decision were perfectly transparent in their details, explaining completely adequately how each of the questions posed to the chairwoman, whose name was recorded variously as Patricia B., Mrs Barring, and Chairwoman Tricia, were answered to their satisfaction. There were footnotes to the effect that the coincidental naming was a source of much amusement to the sitting members, and a vote was held on the matter.
From that unanimously favourable vote onwards, the Silwhim Parish Council took an active role in even the most pedestrian matters of land usage, from denying Mr Smedley the right to have a gazebo in his garden over the summer, to ordering Ms Ullford to tear down her front wall, on account of her failing to put the bins out in good time one Wednesday morning. Not a driveway could be washed, nor a cat chased from the garden, nor a dying young man be offered CPR outside of a permanent structure, without the Parish Council demanding a say in the matter first. Despite the lack of any legal authority, they nevertheless managed to exert an almost crippling degree of control over the lives of the people of Silwhim. All, as they say, was well.
Onwards marched the intrepid Gary, covering ground as best he could and drawing deep, luxurious lungfuls of forest air. Nothing really calmed him like the smell of a woodland, which is to say, marginally. Gary was not the kind of person to whom calmness came naturally, and although woodland was the best source of relaxation he'd thus far discovered in his tawdry and drab life, it still failed to constitute a meaningful sedative. Through his mind still raced the possibilities of climbing every limb in reasonable jumping distance, racing along the path to get the walk completed more quickly, or throwing his shoes as far as could and then trying to beat that record. Nonetheless, he was committed to trying to bring his energy levels down. He did his best to regard the serenity of the sunrays that filtered through leafy canopies above, and to smell the various pollens that were carried on the air. Gary listened for the rustling of squirrels in the undergrowth, and to birdsong that chirruped out from places unseen. He even made a solid attempt at closing his eyes and losing himself in the moment, but this didn't interact well with his refusal to keep walking. If anything, the consistent stumbling and falling only made him less serene.
With the utter failure of these techniques for relaxation, Gary felt just about ready to give up on the exercise of a rejuvenating amble and have a high intensity walk through the woods instead. His acceleration to break-neck strolling pace was, however, disrupted when a mass of bright colour caught his eye.
This distraction was what finally proved enough to not only slow him down, but actually bring him to a full stop. Standing in front of him was a tree unlike any other, somewhat apart from other trees and far more ostentatious in its colouration. Where they had all adopted the generally-agreed-upon green of a summer woodland, varying only in hue and saturation, this tree trod the path less travelled. A loner, much like the man regarding it, this tree featured bright, blood reds, sunshine yellows, sky blues, royal blues, treasonous oranges, and even Cadbury's purple.
Gary stood and drank in the prismatic beauty of the unknown tree ahead of him, marvelling that nature could produce something so wild. Nature, of course, was also marvelling, because it had not produced this tree at all. It had a hand in the building blocks of the monument to colour and arbour, but the credit and blame sat variously at the feet of the Parish Council.
The matter of how their remit was defined, vis. Tricia Barring's abode, was of little consequence to the mysterious Patricia B. after it had been agreed upon. She never once attended a meeting or answered any message after that interaction, nor would she contribute anything to the annual Christmas tombola. It seemed that her sole concern had been to ensure that Tricia Barring, of no presumed relation, would never be bothered by the same busybodies that had been set loose on the rest of Silwhim, and she was apparently contented to leave council matters in the hands of her sitting fellows. Tricia Barring, however, had not considered how her own actions might take a terrible toll on the town.
Over the years, Tricia Barring's estate steadily grew, as she bought up the land around her home and used them for pig farms, fracking, and other wholesome summer activities. The Parish Council could not, and indeed would not, interfere with her business by definition; they were too busy punishing Mr Trellis for walking on a stretch of pavement that had been zoned for skipping only. They did, however, have time at the start of every Parish Council meeting to verify the size of Tricia Barring's home before they decided where their meddling would be best placed.
Ever so gradually, but ever so consistently, the size of Tricia Barring's home grew, and with it grew the undeserved power of the Parish Council. Where previously they were capable only of ruining the lives of the individual, it was increasingly within their ability to inflict top grade inconveniences on whole businesses, making reckless and hard to parse demands with ultimatums that, at their most generous, were already in the past. Tricia Barring was always safe, but she was the only one.
It had been long established within the Silwhim Parish council that power corrupts; after all, the tiny modicum of perceived power with which the council had started had already led to each councillor burning bridges, figuratively and literally, with their friends and neighbours. Power and corruption spiralled hand-in-hand, ever upwards, until the town of Silwhim was merely a chessboard, on which each councillor could inflict devastatingly petty wounds on the lives of their colleagues.
Ms Harrol's chiminea was producing more smoke than Mr Peters would have liked on a springtime evening, and so, rather than simply revoke authorisation for all the cement in her driveway as he would have done previously, he supported planning permission for a chemical processing plant behind her home, upwind in the prevailing direction. Likewise, Mrs Travis took issue with Mr Peters making such a decision without consulting her, and therefore gave her backing to a plan for Mary Marghoul's Mutagens and Crochet Emporium to dispose of their waste mutagenic material in Mr Peters' garden.
Unfortunately for the town of Silwhim, Ms Harrol and Mr Peters both lived in properties that backed onto Chartwig Forest, as did many other victims of chemical-effusion based spite. The impact surveys on local wildlife, it is fair to say, left a lot to be desired.
The leaves of Gary's exciting tree were tipped with white, yellow and red, nature's warnings that perhaps it was best left alone. Unfortunately for both the tree and young Gary, he never had been very good at taking advice when it was offered. Nor when it was thrust upon him, thrown in his face, used as a threat or, in this case, broadcast from thousands of tiny, living danger signs.
Gary was, not to put too fine a point on it, a free actor. This is notably different from a free thinker, because such a title necessarily presupposes that one does at least some non-zero quantity of thinking. A free actor, on the other hand, simply acts, regardless of what factors have or have not been considered.
As was so very often the case with Gary, the amount of thought put into this situation was small. Vanishingly small, in fact. It was the kind of amount that, if placed in a jar, would lead to that jar being declared 'finished' and placed alongside the washing up. Rattling around like a mote of dust in the finished jar that passed for Gary's mind, was the notion that these brightly coloured leaves were awfully pretty, alongside several low-level, subconscious thoughts about how to lift one's hand and grab them most satisfyingly.
Seeing no danger, whether or not it was within the field of view, Gary's adventurous mind immediately disregarded the gentle, single fingered prod technique, as well as the delicate finger and thumb pinch method. These were the actions of cowards and of those who saw any need for caution, a word which Gary could barely define; what little he did know of it led him to believe it was a synonym for 'boring'. Instead, he opted for the toddler's dual-fistful method, grasping indiscriminately at the polychromatic suite of warnings and accepting whatever he got as a good outcome.
Almost as quickly as he'd thrown a hand into the foliage, Gary snatched it away again. The results of his experiment were clear. He had determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that the thin, spiny protrusions on the edges of the crinkled leaves were indeed thin spines, and the soreness of his hand would not let him forget that. Cursing that there had been absolutely no way to tell ahead of time that grabbing the tree was a bad idea, he took another look at the traitorous tree. On closer inspection of the bark, which glinted with iron fragments like many of the trees in Chartwig Forest, he noticed that there was a pattern embossed into it. It was clearly a natural pattern grown by the tree, but it bore an uncanny resemblance to an open human hand, circled and with a line through it.
“Bizarre." he muttered to himself. A tingling sensation around the site of the spines drew his fickle attention down to the hand that had suffered the most. To feel some amount of tingling there seemed perfectly above board and normal, given the circumstances, as did the redness. In his vast experience of puncturing his hands on easily avoided hazards, Gary knew that this was well within expectation. Shortly afterwards, his fingers started to swell up, which wouldn't have been much of an issue if his palm hadn't also started to swell down, shrinking in size until it made his digits look like gargantuan articulated sausages.
"Oh. It seems to have given me small palms. That's... er..." Gary said to himself, peering down at his redistributed hand mass. "Hm."
He gazed in an intent and quite understandable manner for some time, standing there next to the offending tree. He wasn’t worried, per se, just very interested in how events might proceed from that point. If his palms were going to eventually disappear, leaving him with nothing but fingers and a thumb connected to his arm at the wrist, then he’d have a lot of work to do. Aside from learning how to perform basic tasks without the primary source of hand area, there were dozens of gloves that would need heavy modification. That sort of work took a lot of free time, and Gary wasn’t confident that he could commit to doing it all before the winter. Especially not when he was trying to get used to his new hands.
"Are you alright? You know that you're not supposed to be in there, don't you?" asked an apparently concerned dog walker, standing on the path while their dog sat patiently at heel.
"Am I not?"
“No. There are loads of signs on this post and rail fence saying 'No Entry, even for authorised personnel'.”
Gary frowned in thought for a moment.
"Oh yeah. I do recall vaulting that, now that you mention it. And then I vaulted back because the original vaulting made me drop my phone. And then I was tired, so I smashed the padlock off the gate with that rock.” On cue, in the wind, the gate screeched on its hinges in the breeze, fragments of broken padlock and chain adding a metallic rattle. “Funny the things you forget, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is. Just this morning I forgot that I already had a teabag in my mug and nearly made a double bagger with breakfast! What are we like?” chuckled the dog walker. There was an impatient growling from below. “Well, I can see that you're busy and you're chatting happily so you must be fine, so I won't keep you any longer. See you later."
"Yeah, OK. Enjoy your walk, bye." said Gary. He’d always found, whenever anyone said that they wouldn’t keep him any longer, that it was they themselves who wished not to be kept. It was a rare example of something that you could say to yourself on someone else’s behalf, and no-one would question it. To accentuate that he was accepting this declaration of self-emancipation, Gary gave what would normally be a small wave. His enormous fingers, however, rendered that goal rather difficult to achieve, and he ended up giving a malformed, medium-sized wave instead.
With their dog leading the way bravely, cutting a serpentine route across the footpath in pursuit of all the most interesting smells and least edible objects, the dog walker disappeared into the depths of the woodland, leaving Gary alone once again. Quietly, in the back of his mind, some primal part of his brain tried to connect the dots between ignoring warning signs, leaping over physical boundaries, and then getting hurt. It was sure that there was some underlying connection there, some causal link from which it could learn and avoid harm in future, but nothing immediately became clear. He gave up on the notion.
Having satisfied himself that his hands had reached a steady state in terms of finger-to-palm ratio, and feeling relieved that his feet were not following suit, Gary decided that it might be best to wander back to his car. On a whim he decided to keep a clipping of the very interesting tree, partly because it might aid a future diagnosis, and partly because he might find some future need for having hands of this particular shape. This course of action was, it transpired, incredibly easy to carry out, because several of the needle-edged leaves were still stuck in his sleeves and the flesh of his hands. It was a source of great satisfaction to Gary that he wouldn’t have to expend additional effort in carrying a clipping, and counted his blessings for such good fortune.
As a responsible adult man, Gary exited the secure compound in which he’d found the interesting tree, and propped the gate shut using the padlock-bashing rock. Thusly having satisfied himself that the compound was one hundred percent secure again, he started to pace along the woodland path once more.
Although he had been pleased to note that the symptoms in his hands had ceased to develop, Gary was disappointed to discover his chest feeling a little tight. It wasn’t so tight that he couldn’t draw breath, but the exertion of a gentle walk was, apparently, now a little greater than it had been previously.
“Venom is quite bad for you, I guess.” he muttered to himself, astutely, rubbing at his solar plexus with a thumb the size of an aubergine. It didn’t do much to relieve the pressure he was feeling in his airways. In fact, the longer he walked and the more he massaged, the more it felt like a solid obstruction had appeared within his airways. Gary rolled his eyes, with a totally undeserved ‘just my luck’ attitude.
A loud snort and sudden scraping snapped Gary’s attention up from his chest and towards the puffing face of a horse, looking him dead in the eye with ears held forward. With a wheeze, Gary brought himself to a sudden stop and looked into the curious chestnut face of his new equine acquaintance.
“Hello there. What brings you into the woods, horse friend?” Gary managed, before doubling over into a fit of hacking coughs.
“Just a pleasant day to ride through… are you alright?” replied a woman’s voice. Gary had never expected a horse to sound like that, but in the absence of any other direct evidence of horse speech he had no solid grounds on which to refute the notion. Although he wanted to reply to the miraculous speaking animal, he was still too busy coughing. “Do you need some help?”
Gary held up a hand to reassure and placate the horse, indicating that he had this whole blocked-airway business totally under control, but a gasp reminded him that his hands didn’t currently scream ‘this is a well man’.
“I’m fine…” he coughed. “… totally fine. Just a bit of a cough.” Finally regaining some control over himself, he drew a deep breath and stood up straight again to get a better look at the talking horse. It looked fairly ordinary, except for the leather straps across its face and metal hanging from either side of its mouth. Wondering if this was a mechanism to take words from its mouth up to a broadcast system, Gary followed two further lines of leather from the metal up to a woman, sitting on a saddle on the horse’s back and looking concerned.
“Oh, hello. You don’t have a talking horse after all, my mistake.” Gary observed. Given that the woman was dressed from head to toe in fluorescent pink, yellow and orange, and practically mummified in reflective strips, it was impressive that he had been able to miss her. Far from ‘high visibility’, she had reached the heights of being uncomfortably visible and was probably the primary source of light in the woodland.
“Erm, no. Although he talks to me in his own way.” she said, with a level of diplomacy that Gary probably didn’t deserve. The horse stretched its head forwards to sniff at Gary.
“Yeah?” asked Gary, as politely as he could, before another fit of coughs. “I just got prickled by a bush and I think I’m allergic to it or something. Does your horse need something?”
The horse’s nose was, by this point, getting fully involved in every pocket that it could see around Gary’s person, sniffing optimistically at each one, lest it contain a bale of hay that might otherwise go unnoticed. When it poked him in the chest, testing for hidden compartments that might contain a bag of apples, the pressure tipped Gary over the edge into one, final, enormous expulsion of air from his lungs. Air was not the only thing that had been expelled, however.
Much to Gary’s confusion, the rider’s horror, and the horse’s delight, Gary had coughed out three whole carrots, which landed on the path in front of him in a neat bouquet.
“Oh dear. I seem to have carrot-lung.” Gary surmised immediately. The rider was unavailable for comment, struggling as she was to prevent the horse from devouring the biologically questionable carrots. Moving his feet out of desperation more than necessity, the horse danced backwards and forwards in a short arc, pulling and straining at the bridle in an attempt to have an impromptu woodland feast.
“They came out of a person! Stop it!” protested the rider, knowing in her heart of hearts that her horse was not in a mood to would listen to reason. It was easy to know that, because her horse was never in a mood to listen to reason.
Given that the horse and rider were taking up much of the path with their dance of wills, all Gary could really do was stand and wait, occasionally bringing up another carrot. Eventually, the pair of them reached some kind of inscrutable accord, the fancy hoof-work ceased, and the horse satisfied itself by launching a thorough investigation of Gary himself. While the floor carrots were out of bounds, a confusing notion in and of itself considering where carrots usually grew, there might be other root vegetables ensconced around Gary’s body that were fair game.
“Sorry about that. He gets a bit worked up sometimes. Is it normal for you to cough carrots out?”
“I wouldn’t say normal… this is probably the… well…” Gary looked upwards “… first time it’s happened, I’d say.”
A slightly damp nose bashed Gary’s face. The horse was not concerning itself with matters of personal space any longer, instead employing his most powerful investigative tools of sniffing, snorting, sneezing and snuffling around any pockets it could. Quite honestly, a lot of equine investigation depends heavily on the nose, and on verbs starting with ‘sn’.
“Perhaps you should get yourself home then, or to a doctor. Or if they turn out to be safe, you could move into wholesale for a grocer’s I suppose.” surmised the rider.
“Yes, I think so. I am on my way home now, in fact.”
“I won’t keep you any longer then. Walk on, Porcelain. Nice to meet you, sir, and I hope that you get better soon.”
Coughing out one final distraction carrot by way of reply, Gary lifted a hand to wave goodbye and then, once the coast was clear of any equine investigators, proceeded again.
Progress back through the woods was, it pained Gary to admit, going more slowly than his initial advance. Partly this was the encounter with a horse, but other extenuating circumstances included frequent pauses to vent root vegetables from his lungs, and general distraction about the state of his hands. It was around this time that Gary started to doubt whether he’d done the right thing by coming to the woods that day. If anything, he felt less calm than when he’d started, and he’d have a tough time lighting any scented candles now that his fingers were each the size of paint tin.
During the course of his lamentations about the ill-fated walk on which he had come, Gary gradually started to feel somehow lighter. It wasn’t a figurative lightness of spirits, because a sense of concern still weighed heavily over him, but a literal easing of the pressure between his feet and the ground. His legs were just as tired as they had been before, but the burden on them had been eased. The burning sensation in his palm was also feeling a little cooler, but his trousers had started to flap as if they were caught in a gale. In all of his experience of getting easily avoidable infections, Gary had never known the symptoms to spread to his clothing, least of all in such a way as to grant them the power of motion.
Looking down to gather more precious data about the situation, Gary was a little surprised to note that dust and debris from the forest floor was skittering away from him, as if caught in the downdraft of a helicopter, or improperly directed hairdryer.
“Pedestrian!” shouted someone from the path ahead, once again distracting Gary from his ruminations on the local wind conditions. It seemed that the shout had come from a person who was more Lycra than man. A sleek, aerodynamic helmet was attached by chin straps to his bonce, fingerless gloves provided partial protection to his hands, and a bicycle splattered with fresh mud from somewhere secret in the bone dry woodland was beneath him. Behind, a whole flotilla of other cyclists, forming a rainbow of skin-tight clothing and sunglasses, concertinaed together as their impressive momentum was arrested.
“Hi, thanks.” Gary said, lifting a hand in gratitude at not being stampeded by the spandex bandits. This movement, however, proved more aggressive than he’d anticipated.
Like a lovingly stacked display of tins at a supermarket being felled by the careless charge of a toddler at ramming speed, the collection of cyclists was suddenly scattered. Those who fell did so immediately, creating a trip hazard for the masses, while those who kept their feet & wheels were propelled backwards in shaky, chaotic trajectories by the fearsome hurricane winds emanating from Gary’s teeny tiny palm.
“Wind!” one of the cyclists shouted, nobly trying to maintain the courtesy of warning her companions of perils, but it was something of a redundant exercise.
Shocked by both his incredible power and development in general, Gary looked into his palm in fascination, giving himself a fierce and unpleasant wind-boarding in the process. Stopping narrowly short of pulling his eyelids back over his skull, Gary pointed the palm back down at the floor again, generating enough lift to rest his legs a little.
“Sorry! Sorry!” he called to the panting and uneasy fleet of bicycle enthusiasts, some of whom had suffered grazing wounds that might take days to heal. “I didn’t realise that I was, uh, creating winds.”
“How could you not notice that happening? I’d definitely know if I was generating weather from my hands.” someone replied from the writhing morass of cyclists on the ground.
“There was the time your handlebars looked as if it had been raining, Tarquin.” another observed.
“That was just sweat because I was pushing beyond my normal limits.”
“Pretty sure there was a high pressure system moving into your hands, Tarq. It came with a general suppression of air temperature, remember?”
“That was a coincidence.” he argued, without being terribly convincing.
“Alright, but what about when the area around Clarissa’s handlebars was perfectly still and temperate, when it was raining everywhere else.”
“Yeah, I can’t explain that.” replied the presumable Clarissa. She had managed to stay upright, but was lodged between two trees and trying to gently extract herself.
“Had you been prickled by the colourful tree down there?” Gary asked, excitedly.
“No idea. It was a windy day in autumn though, so anything could have blown over the path.”
“You also had that hand-cover on though. It’s like a huge plastic bubble in which the handlebars are enshrouded, so that the hands can stay warm and dry while you achieve break-neck speeds.” someone who had been blown a good thirty metres back down the path explained. They seemed all too comfortable with shouting in the otherwise tranquil woodland.
“I see. Maybe not then. Either way, I’m sorry.” Gary reiterated.
“Not to worry, chum. Things like this happen.” said Clarissa. She paused for a moment. “I mean, I guess they must happen because they just did, but it’s not really that frequent.”
“It smelled like a pine air freshener.” added Tarquin, apparently calmed by his companions. “Which is a bit weird. Not more weird than you having windy hands in the first place, but still remarkable.”
“Yeah, I thought that as well. I must have a coniferous infection.” Gary decided. There was general assent from the cyclists, most of whom were now upright again and ready to proceed. “I won’t keep you any longer.” he said, desperate not to be kept by them any longer and stepping off the path.
“Will you keep your hands down while we go past, please?” asked someone in violet and lime lycra. “I just don’t really fancy being thrown into a tree.”
“No problem.” Gary agreed, locking his arm into his side and feeling the wind tear at his trousers again.
“Actually, you could point it our way as we go, if you’re willing?” suggested Tarquin. “Be nice to have a tail wind for a bit.”
“You know what, it’s the least I can do under the circumstances.”
“Great, thanks very much. Have a good day.” Tarquin said, leaning onto his pedals and slowly rolling into motion once more. A general burble of gratitude and goodbyes came from the rest of the brigade as they cycled past and, when the final one had rolled on by, Gary let them have it with both hands. Under the sudden and violent acceleration from behind, the cyclists disappeared at lightning speeds into the depths of the wood, leaving Gary alone once more.
Angling his hands slightly down and backwards, he was able to make much more expeditious progress along the path back to the car park, thanks to jet propulsion. It was a matter of mere minutes before, with no further interruptions by other users of the woods, he made it back in view of his car. It appeared as if someone else had taken the time to close the gate after themselves, like a real dogsbody, so Gary made sure to prop it open with another rock. Parish council threats be damned, poor gate etiquette had got him into this situation so it was only reasonable to assume it would get him out of it too.
It was something of a trial to get his keys out of his pocket. The powerful gale from his palm first inflated the trouser leg like a hot air balloon, which made things easier, but without anywhere to go the air pocket started to work against him, holding his hand away from the very keys he sought to grab. Even when he managed to make progress, the winds pushed the keys themselves further away, driving them into the flesh of his leg.
“This is annoying.” he said to himself, withdrawing the hand for the time being and blowing air onto the car park surface in the process. A tornado of small gravel shards was whipped up, wreaking a terrible toll on the paintwork and mirrors of a hatchback parked nearby. Gary was unconcerned.
Several experimental techniques of key retrieval followed, including blowing the keys from the other side of the pocket, jumping up and down a lot, and even just shouting at them to get the heck out, but none worked. The whole exercise seemed fruitless, and Gary was on the cusp of giving up and simply removing the garment, when his eyes started to feel peculiar. He tried to focus on something close by, his wristwatch, and found that while he could see it sharply enough, the hands seemed to be running too quickly. In fact, they were accelerating. Then, he saw his arm relax down to the ground, sending up a spray of debris that flew directly at his face, but felt nothing.
Wondering if his senses had taken to simple lying, Gary felt his arm, which looked like it was down but felt like it was up, relax to his side. Then, without seeing a single thing coming, a twig struck him on the face. Reeling from the impact, Gary’s eyes then told him that he was lying down on the ground, lifting his legs into the air, and gently shaking his keys out. Still feeling himself standing, he watched on with mixed emotions has he pinched the keys between the backs of his hands, thus keeping them safe from the winds, and entered the car.
This dissonance between his senses was not a welcome development. As far as everything except sight told Gary, he was standing stock still in a car park, but his eyes claimed that he was now back inside the car, looking at the internal clock. It read a clear half an hour ahead of what his watch had said.
It took a lot of quiet pondering, eye scrunching and mental gymnastics for Gary to parse what his senses were telling him, but finally an epiphany reached him.
“Oh…” he said, for the benefit of no-one else, for he was alone in the car park. “I think I have time-sight. I’m seeing the future. That’s going to make driving a real pig, even though I will apparently get my keys back at some stage.”
Trying to formulate a plan of action, Gary stood in quiet contemplation for a long while. Seeing through time was a lot to take in, especially when he was trying to come to terms with it while his eyes made wild claims that he was turning the keys and driving away. All he could do for some time was watch the show as he pulled out of the car park, cut someone up on a quiet residential road, and tailgated a bus. Finally, after witnessing himself cut across a village green to avoid a pothole, he decided that contemplation and watching himself silently drive was achieving nothing, so he might as well go through the motions of getting his keys out and sit in the car. Gary felt himself lie down and, much more slowly than he’d seen events unfold, he jiggled about until he heard keys clatter to the dirt beside him. Working remarkably well from memory alone, he grabbed the keys blindly with his backhands and entered the car, all the while seeing himself mount the kerb outside his house, post the car key through his letter box, and then enter through the front door.
With hope in his heart that he would work out why those things had happened in about half an hour, Gary started his car and made his way home, ready to sleep off the perfectly normal symptoms from which he was suffering.