I wonder what H.G. Wells would have said about the below flash fiction I wrote in my younger years where the croquet players are even weirder than he imagined - since they are groundhogs. Enjoy!
HOW GROUNDHOGS PLAY CROQUET
A psychologist by the name of Brentworth proves the high level of intelligence in animals by teaching a quartet of groundhogs how to play croquet. When the four groundhogs are proficient enough to have a game on their own, Brentworth invites his colleagues to join him on his screened-in back porch and watch as the groundhogs play on the lawn in his backyard.
Brentworth chose groundhogs because of the way they can hold their mallets when they sit up on their haunches. Anyway, the groundhogs are having a good go at croquet, taking their proper turns, hitting their balls through the wickets in the proper sequence.
The psychologists sit in a row and watch silently except for one man at the far end, who starts to sob uncontrollably. After a groundhog puts his yellow ball through a wicket from a decided angle and a good twenty feet away, Brentworth says, "What a magnificent shot!"
The groundhogs play on. The sobs from the man at the end grow louder and his body heaves. "You all don't know what this means," he says between heaves. As a sort of grand finale, after the completion of their game, the groundhogs gather all the croquet ball and hit them one by one so the balls knock against one another in a neat row. Until now, nobody has noticed that a different white letter is painted on each of the seven brightly colored and stripped wooden balls. The lineup of balls now spells a word for all the read: "CROQUET".
"How clever, how very, very clever," one psychologist says. The man on the end, who is still sobbing, says, "This is terrible! No one understands what this means!" They all turn to look at him, and he buries his face in his hands as his sobs grow even louder.
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