THE FINAL HOLE
The Constitutional Hole

(The Glaring Hole)

The Green Queen:  ”I am not just
a fair-weather friend.”

black rain of pepper came thundering down, darkening everything.  Oddly, ominously, the pepper itself twinkled as it fell, the way snow does at night under a street light.  But this dark falling substance was unlike any rain or snow that Alice ever saw.  Down!  Down!  Down!  poured the shower of pepper and in its dark pall everything began to vanish:  first the golf carts, then the green, and then all the holes filled up with pepper, leaving a black constant sheen over the vast flat expanse extending every way in the distance.  The woods were black, and the water traps, and the golf umbrellas … but the players, oblivious of the change in the weather, seemed not to know the Constitutional Hole had in fact been sunk, for Senator Fraser’s caddy had already done it.  He had stolen the GLARING HOLE.
 
The Queen’s Team and the People’s Team continued wrestling with their beavers till finally the two teams collapsed in a sooty muddle, with Tyler on his back, snoring in the middle.

 
Everything and everyone around her, from the frogg grass, to the putting green, to the Bush, and all the way past the Glaring Hole to the far horizon was flooded in darkness.
 
Gloom, gloom, gloom, the gloom was everywhere.
 
Alice alone was not enveloped in the still softly descending black pall of pepper.
 
Then, up rushed Henderson to prod, nudge and pull the muddled players apart, who dog-tired, began to brush the pepper from their hair, as more falling pepper replaced it.
 
Consumed with joy, Henderson seized the foremost player by both hands, which he clasped together in his own, and began vigorously to pump while addressing the whole half-aroused frog-faced muddle of The Queen’s Team and the exhausted faces of the Peoples’ Team.  “Basically, congratulations, folks!” shouted Henderson, who, like Alice herself, was unaffected by the still descending pepper, for none of the black stuff had stuck to him, either.
 
Then the Earth began to shake.  The players cringed, but not Henderson, who fixed his eyes on the distant Clock Tower, as if expectant.  Crash!  Boom!  Thunder came rolling in toward the Golf Green from all directions, for the storm wasn’t over.  The turf trembled fearfully under Alice’s feet.  On the far edge of the storm front, Alice thought she saw an Egg bobble.  Coal black clouds piled and billowed overhead as lightning fissured the sky.  Thunder claps mounted in volume and violence, at last to resonate in the loud expectoration of a giant collective SNEEZE …. Sah! Sah! Sah! Seshun!
 
“Gezundheit!” thought Alice desperately, but it was too late to say it.
 
After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead silence.  Alice lifted up her head in some alarm as Law Professor and Golf Pro, Stephen Allan Scott, came striding toward her out of the gloom.
 
Scott’s golf attire was immaculate; he shone like a headlight emerging from a tunnel.
 
“Why!” cried Alice, wary and surprised, “There isn’t a speck of it on you, either!”  She meant the awful twinkling substance that had blackened the whole of Referendumland.
 
“And none on you,” rejoined the Law Professor.  How are you doing it?
 
“Doing what?”, asked Alice, genuinely innocent.
 
ONLINE:  12 September 2019
UPDATE:  15 September 2019