Listening is what I do best (Cheerful)

Listening is what I do best

(Third person? – Friendly, Cheerful – Past tense)

“Listening is what I do best” he used to say. Then he would lean back, take a long pull from his pint and create that pregnant silence for someone else to fill. And he was good at listening. When someone started talking, filling the silence he had left, he would lean forward, his eyes focussed on their face and follow what they were saying intently. His grey eyes opened wide as he followed their words and he would nod or shake his head to demonstrate that he understood the significance of what they were saying.

Jack was certainly a good listener but he was a good talker too. That was why people used to join him at the table and buy him drinks. People would even hover behind those who were seated and strain to hear what he said. When the first speaker had finished, Jack would pick up the thread and start weaving his own story.

Jack’s stories where the stuff of legend. He didn’t talk about the usual pub topics of: politics, sport, current affairs or the state of the nation. Instead he would take whatever the first speaker had been talking about and slowly turn it into something else, something strange and other-worldly. As often as not, he would start with “I remember when…”, telling the audience about some event in the distant past. Then the magic began. He would draw people into the story as slowly it became more and more bizarre and eyes opened wider and jaws dropped lower.

The best tales involved fishing. None of the audience doubted that Jack had once been a keen angler, but in his tales he had landed fish that should have required a trawler to bring them ashore. The “ones that got away” were larger still. People recounted one occasion when Jack described himself riding one particular monster down river like a surfer until it eventually escaped him in the sea.

Jack was certainly good at listening, but most of the regulars in the pub, and plenty of visitors, thought that what he was best at was telling stories!

(7^th October 2016 – 363 words)