Spontaneous Story

You go out for a drive
With no particular
Destination in mind –
No particular route mapped out –
No particular time to arrive
At the place you don’t know
You are going to.

The windows are down,
You’re left arm
Resting on the door,
Sunburned the color of a peach.
The inrushing air is deafening
And then suddenly you see it –
A big overstuffed couch,
Abandoned in a field.

You stop and stare at it.
How did it get to this field?
Did someone drive up?
Let it out, drive away
And abandon it like a dog?

This couch is massive.
The Plymouth Rock of couches -
A missing monolith from Stonehenge
And then some poor young couple
Comes along and builds a house around it
They sit on it at night and watch TV.
They share it with family and company.

And then one day the wife says -
This old thing has got to go.
Get it out of here!
So the husband puts it out at the curb.
But the next morning the couch
Is back in the house
And the wife says: I thought I
Told you to get rid of this couch!
You did. I did: The husband stammers.

So this time he loads it into his pickup
And his wife says I’m coming, too.
So they drive around looking
For a place the dump the couch.
Finally, they find a big empty field
And they stop. The husband and wife
Get out and dump it into the field.
It rolls end over end and lands upright.

As the couple turns to leave
The couch speaks:
I am not really a couch.
I am a magic coach.
I only changed a few letters in my name
So I could disguise myself.
My King sent me here
To find a couple to take over his kingdom
For he is ailing.
I thought you might be that couple,
But you aren’t.
You treated me kindly at first,
Like part of your family,
But then you tried to abandon me in this field.

Wait, we are really kind and loving.

No, I am sorry, you are not.
And now I must go.
And with that the couch
Turned into a beautiful golden coach
And flew back up into the heavens.

And the couple,
Unable to recover from their stupidity,
became homeless,
And spend the rest of their lives
Pushing around shopping carts
Full of discarded odds and ends,
Looking in fields
For large abandoned couches
That might be magic coaches