Horace Street

A red telephone on the desk rang. No one went to answer it.

On a particularly absent-minded day, I happened to be walking with my head in a fantastical book about frogs. As my eyes devoured the last sentence, I looked up. I wasn’t where I was meant to be. In fact, I didn’t know where I was, which was to say that I was lost.

In normal circumstances, I’d have been concerned, what with work the next day and all (I had all sorts of forms to fill out, and no change of tie), however it was a Friday afternoon and I had all weekend to un-lost myself.

I looked around to try and get some kind of an idea as to where I was. I knew where I wasn’t, so I felt by a process of elimination that I could narrow it down to where I was. I wasn’t at home. I’d been there before and would surely recognize it again.

There weren’t many trees around so I ruled out being in the forest. I once saw a cowboy film, which was set in a desert with cacti (that’s more than one cactus) sand and buttes (they’re big rocks), but there were none of those things.

I could breathe quite normally, so I could safely assume that I wasn’t in the sea.

This went on for quite some time until I decided that a simpler way of of answering my “where am I/where aren’t I” questions were to do a little bit of exploring. I was on a road. In the distance I could spy a few dim lights. It was getting a little bit darker now so I set off for the lights. Like eyes staring at me, we kept our stares fixed on each other until I reached a street sign next to a street that branched off from the road I was on.