A duck's story

In a small northern town nestling between green hills, in a time when bread was bread, delivered by boys on bikes, pushed up steep cobbled streets to old frowning women with saggy tights and rolling pins,

where clogged and cloth capped men’s hard day’s graft down pit, black faces ingrained with coal soot, dug deep from the heart of the earth with iron picks, to burn in endless fires, billowing smoke into the air, distorted sunsets into cascades of purples, pinks and orange,

who didn’t talk nonsense and relaxed by putting ferrets down trousers and fisty cuffs outside shutting pubs as the moon rose, shining peaceful yellow light over the occasional spurt of blood or a broken tooth’s tumbling trajectory through the air in an arch to the gutter below,

near the mill, up the alley by the church, along a red brick faced Victorian terrace, past the working man’s club and right by the brass band playing in the park was a pond.

In the pond was a duck.

Who, when his fellow ducks flew into whirl-winds of anger and love or wildly swung from greed to compassion, stayed in a perpetual state of mild bemusement.

Some said his temperamental range was limited – others that it was unique – yet more that he suffered from a peculiar aliment that rarely afflicts the emotionally volatile duck-kind and was waddling a tight wire along the fine line between tedium and tension.

Maybe they all had a point.

When the delivery boys grew weary with the hills and tossed their yeasty loads into the blue water ways the other ducks hunger lust took over and a crazed soggy bread frenzy generally ensued – the desire for food and a full stomach lightening up their eyes and minds like volcanoes,

this duck just chuckled and commented on the silliness of the situation, nibbling on any spare morsel passing by.

When the female ducks’ dull and dowdily exteriors became to the male fraternity a sweet and erotic taste of paternity,

when the male’s bright and colourful plumage mirrored their reckless and brave antics stirring up deep within the hearts of the female ducks a fiery passion so bright that even the furnaces hell were dimmed in comparison,

our hero just looked on with a befuddled frown, maybe making a dry quip.

When the rumour that mad pike Frazer had taken old Bill Duckerty’s leg clean off as he paddled past a canal boat filled with slag and rubble, pulled by a weary shire-horse, metal clod hoofs clip–clopping along the towpath, surfaced and spread like wild fire around the small duck community,

our duck didn’t spend the next few days nervously peering down into the watery depths watching for mad pike Frazer’s glimmering eye as he started his lunge - or let paranoia force mass flights of fear from the slightest noise.

Oh no - for fate wasn’t a fickle and cruel mistress to him – she was a pleasant and amiable companion.

Even at the end.

One day a ferret who had seen one too many miners’ cocks went insane and made a break from his trouseriery prison. Freedom often falls badly on the ill informed especially the spatially deprived and his blissful flee across the park ended suddenly when he saw our protagonist’s neck.

It reminded him of the horror of his snaky tormentors since a young age.

He leaped and sunk his teeth in as deep as he could.

As our duck’s life ebbed away, as he finally realised the reality of endless oblivion, the eternity of nothing that would be over in the blink of an eye he did not experience the unmitigated terror normally associated with such things.

He just raised an eyebrow put on a wry smile and thought…

“Well. This is a turn up for the books!”

What a duck!