GolfDreams

The world is bathed in fog. The sky is Caribbean water teal, the grass emerald-hills green. I can barely stand up, lining up for my swing. The purple haze over the course, wreathing around me, purple-humidity off the poison water of a Mario Bros. DS level, it winds and twists, the dragon-tail of opium smoke in a hazy den of Victorian depravity. I’m in heaven, indulgent, succulent fruits of an Ottoman merchant drizzling down my chin in sweet juices as I crack fiberglass into the ball and watch a sweet, satisfying parabola arc over the fairway.

The second hole dips into the woods, sheltered tight into a curve amidst heavy trees. I’m suffocating after the open pleasures of the first hole, always the most attractive, rolling straight in a wavy ocean-swell to the final hole. Now I’m trapped, and becoming more trapped. I take shitty iron shots and look up. Birds fly overhead in a scattering, wings pelting in a gliding delta beneath fluffy clouds moving, painted on the interior of the firmament, their positions sliding along the smooth tempura surface of the mural. 

I meet the eyes of a deer, stalking sightlines down the long grass expanse. I hold my 6-iron like a gun held relaxed and tensed, stalking down the hill towards the ball. We make eye contact and it screams off, cutting deep gashes into the fairway as I chase after it.

I lose it in the woods for a reprieve from the game. A beautiful gemfield of flowers expands before me, twinkling dewdrops alight in the midmorning sun bearing down into the tree-circled grove. Leaves dazzle as the petals sway in the wind, my ball is nowhere to be found. My party is putting as I stumble out, slipping a throw-down at a random spot, my head clouded, my mouth slurring drunken love as I slap another shot onto the green and rejoin them, thoughts flown away in another swarm of white birds in the hot blue air.

I lose sight of the ball in its parabolic arc down the expansive green, disappearing after four hundred yards into a dog leg, the hills rising up to make a horizon line. Fore, I hope it weakly yells as I catch it, my silent soul aloft over the hills, unable to parse anything but the grass green rolling between a blue ocean above it. I become a shipwreck, gurgling, weighted, at the bottom of a black crushing abyss, waving myself through the suffocating blanket of saltwater drownweight.

A deer poked through the foliage, its human face looking me down and through to the dirt. I raised my club again, though a strange aura prevented us from moving closer or farther. A beam was cast, high blue between my eyes and its, my club poised as its antlers, unable to strike or charge, unable to retreat…