Red Hats

The Red Hat People lived in Red Hat Land and rarely wandered beyond its margins. I was one such Red Hat Person who had wondered why wearing red hats was such a ‘thing’, and so the only way to find out was by means of foolhardiness, viz. to see what hats other people wore elsewhere. Not that it was easy to leave — dragging myself through hedges backward and across foot stiles meant for a different bodily scale and configuration to mine. And none of it was made any easier through my needing to maintain standards while continuing to sport the standard red hat on my head. However, in thankful counterpoint, the hat bore a brim that gave me sporadic shade from the scorching sun during the hottest part of the day. In fact I felt as if it must seem invisible when silhouetted against a similar colour in the red hot sky. But can a silhouette be any other colour but black? It is strange how my thoughts can twist and turn once seeded in my mind. And as soon as I emerged from one particular hedge with the hat still perched on my head, I saw the nature of the next foot stile that faced me. Near it or upon it, a man could be discerned in a blue hat and the biggest head imaginable within it, at least the biggest head imaginable by me. He had needed to hang his hat on the stile’s hand-hold and it was as if the stile’s structure also bore a harness somewhere to give further support to his head. I looked at the sky beyond the stile upon which he was propped and saw the firmament was gradually turning as blue as his hat, with indications the sun was setting on the other side of the stile, with later signs, even as I watched, of the blue becoming a navy sort of blue, evidently soon to turn black. It was then, in sudden panic, that I escaped back through the last hedge and it was far more difficult than when I had come in the opposite direction, and this was because the spiky bits had firmly turned against me. And the difficulty was the same when I turned round and tried to go forward instead of backward into the hedge whence I had so recently emerged. My red hat from Red Hat Land was already forgotten in the earlier panic, and I could now see it was hanging upon one of the hedge spikes as tiny as the tiniest red berry. And I felt tears on the point of brimming over.