Forklift Fiasco
Most sheep chew grass and stare at fences. Clive drove a forklift.
Not well, mind you. But he drove one, and that was the important thing. Every morning he'd climb into the seat — which was not designed for hooves, or for someone with a centre of gravity shaped like a cotton ball — and he'd spend eight hours stacking pallets in a warehouse that smelled like cardboard and someone's divorce.
The humans had stopped questioning it. Dave in receiving had tried, once, early on. He'd marched up to the forklift with his clipboard and said, "You're a sheep." And Clive had said, "You're forty-three and you still can't work the laminator, Dave." And that was the end of that conversation.
Things were fine. Things were always fine, right up until they weren't.
Clive was ripping down Aisle 4 — too fast, he knew it was too fast, but the forklift had this sweet spot at about twelve miles an hour where the engine hummed and the world felt right — when he spotted something on the floor. A can of soda. Half-full. Just sitting there like it owned the place.
He swerved.
The potatoes on his forks didn't swerve with him.
The pallet swung wide and caught the edge of a crate stack, and then physics took over. Clive watched it happen in that horrible slow way where your brain has time to think "oh, this is going to be really bad" but your body has already committed to the mistake. Crate hit crate hit crate. The whole wall of them came down like God had sneezed on a Jenga tower.
Cans everywhere. Bags split open. A box of something marked FRAGILE made a sound that was very much not the sound of something surviving.
Footsteps. Shouting. Dave's voice, already at full volume, which meant he'd been waiting for this.
Clive looked at the exit. He looked at the mess. He looked at the exit again.
"Nope," he said, and floored it.
The forklift blasted through the warehouse doors and out into daylight. Clive squinted against the sun, potatoes bouncing off the back of the machine and tumbling across the car park like escapees. He hit the main road doing fifteen, which on a forklift feels like ninety.
A man on a bicycle saw him coming and just... stopped pedalling. Didn't swerve. Didn't shout. Just watched Clive go past with the expression of someone who'd given up on understanding the world.
"Sorry! Work emergency!" Clive yelled, waving a hoof.
The siren started about two minutes later. Clive heard it before he saw the car — that rising wail that makes your stomach go cold even when you haven't done anything wrong. He checked the mirror. Blue lights. Gaining fast.
"Oh, come on," Clive muttered. "It's a forklift. How is this a priority?"
But the police car was committed. Clive was committed. The forklift was making a noise like a washing machine full of spanners, but it was committed too.
He took a left down a country lane because it seemed like the kind of road where the police might give up. They did not give up. The officer behind the wheel was gesturing at him — big, theatrical arm movements that Clive couldn't decode at speed. Pull over? Slow down? Why are you a sheep?
Clive pushed the forklift harder. The engine screamed. Dashboard lights he'd never seen before started blinking. Something under the hood went clang in a way that sounded expensive and final.
Then he saw the sign: *CITY LIMITS — AIRPORT 3 MILES.*
The airport. Planes. Planes go far away. Far away was exactly where Clive needed to be.
"Three miles," he whispered. "You can do three miles, you beautiful, stupid machine."
The forklift disagreed. It made it two and a half miles before the engine coughed, shuddered, and died with a long, sad wheeze right at the airport entrance. Smoke poured from under the hood like the machine was trying to signal for help.
The police car pulled up behind him. The officer stepped out, staring.
Clive sat in the dead forklift, surrounded by smoke and the faint smell of burnt potato, and tried to look like someone who had a reasonable explanation for all of this.
He did not have a reasonable explanation for any of this.