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Fiction - Excerpts by Ric Hess
• A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
• SOMEONE'S LAUGHING
• OPENING DAY
• AS I WAS TELLING MY HUSBAND
• PLAYING THROUGH
• DIVERSIONS

Other Writing and Design Experience

PLAYING THROUGH

The early Romans named it paganica, the Chinese ch’ui wan, and to the ancient Celts it was shinty. “D’ya know why they call this game golf?” my late Uncle Walt would ask me, cigar clenched in his teeth, an improbably colored tam-o’-shanter perched on his balding pate.

I caddied for him on Sunday mornings at the country club that he belonged to, a carefully manicured course in the suburbs of Detroit. He’d grin at me then, take a swig of beer, poised for the punch line…
“Because ‘Fuck’ was taken!” he’d roar. Then a vicious swing, a resounding thwack, and the ball would fly, or dribble, or bounce away from him, always on some random course of its own. He’d stand there, amazed at its treachery, as if the ball were possessed of some singular and defiant spirit. Usually, oblivious to the irony, he’d mutter “fuck” under his breath. Uncle Walt paid me ten dollars a round and he told the same joke every time we played. He died one afternoon when I was thirteen, bogged down in a sand trap, trying desperately to hack his way out, when finally the heat and the booze and the frustration conspired to overload his poor, corpulent heart.

“Fuck,” Walt cried, for the last time, a strangled, confused look on his face as he collapsed on the sand. At first I thought it was another of his jokes.

“It’s already taken, Uncle Walt,” I told him as he lay there. Then I noticed that his face was turning blue.

I witnessed all of this as a youth and still I chose to play the game, a development that took place not long after I’d moved down to Florida; that humid, dismal land where ancient duffers swing away while perched on the abyss, marking time until they are called to practice their shots in the hereafter.

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Ric Hess
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