Fair Dealing
by Doug Jacquier
As Mr. Orr’s
son, Welles, trudged slowly along to Hardly Fair,
sitting on the bone-rattling seat of his cart
pulled by a horse he’d borrowed (Clyde’s
‘Dale’), he speculated on what prices
the goods he had on board would fetch.
He had no real
head for trade and was easily confused when he
had to calculate how many apples were in a pound
of grapes and whether a wigwam for a goose’s
bridle was considered essential for a man of good
standing or a luxury that few could afford.
He knew that
he could always rely on selling a few left-handed
screwdrivers and some cans of striped paint and a
couple of boxes of skyhooks to the dimmer folk
but he always rode home thinking that what he
really needed was something considered
universally necessary by his largely impecunious
customers eking out a living on the Aero Plains.
He grew barely
enough to feed himself and his family of
undiscovered artists, alchemists and potboiler
authors (whose only real talent seemed to be
procreation and who constantly complained that
their genius was being stifled by the lack of an
indoor toilet), so he had no agricultural surplus
to sell.
As his spine
almost cracked crossing the rock-strewn Crickety
Creek, it dawned on him that the answer was right
beneath his feet (or at least Dale’s feet),
namely water, so the next week he rode to market
with crates of bottled water labelled “Welles
Water – Sourced from a pristine mountain
stream and guaranteed free of cholera, typhoid,
anthrax and all manner of other diseases present
in Crickety Creek!”
On his way
home in his newly-purchased flatbed truck, he
collected the water barrels filled by his ne’er-do-well
family from Crickety Creek and set out for his
bottling plant.
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