About this story
Five wool wagons need grass no one will grant them, so the carriers vote to camp on forbidden station ground after dark. A horse-trader you barely trust talks you into swapping your mare for a black horse of uncertain history. As dusk closes in, hoofbeats approach from Runnymede, and no one yet knows whose.
How it opens
Unemployment left you with several weeks' money and twenty-two pocket diaries.
A holiday makes a philosopher of any official whose wages have stopped.
You opened the 1883 volume at random and found one spare line for September ninth.
If you expand that line honestly, none of us will recognize ourselves.
Choose
I will preserve what happened and distrust the dignity memory adds.
A diary owes truth to events, not comfort to the people in them.