Microfiction #writephoto: Dangerous games

This bit of whimsy is for Sue’s Thursday photo prompt.

Once upon a time, in the wilds of the far Northlands, there lived a community of trolls. The pride of their tribal lands was not the snow-capped mountain, the majestic glacier or the deep, dark fjord, but a beautiful, silk-smooth, impeccably rolled bowling green. Every Saturday evening, the elderly and not so elderly trolls would troll over to the bowling green and spend the long hours of Nordic moonlight solemnly rolling polished rocks across the greensward. The idyll, alas, turned to tragedy after the visit of a cousin from the south.

Everything in the Northlands was new to Eamon, the mountains, the glaciers, the fjords, but nothing appeared stranger than the game of bowls. In fact, Eamon found it utterly incomprehensible. The ball games he was used to were much more boisterous, if not riotous, accompanied by growls and roars and the loss of many limbs. Which is why, when the troll doyen, in a friendly gesture, handed Eamon a bowling ball and offered him a turn, it was more or less inevitable that someone was going to get hurt.

The punishment for Eamon’s gross abuse of hospitality was to be left out when the sun rose the next morning. You can still see him, a paw to his mouth in a gesture of horror, and his unfortunate, headless victim. A lesson to all hooligans.