Sparks flew around Man’s head. Red, yellow, green; all the colours of the rainbow and more. His eyes followed the floating blots eagerly as they swam in front of his vision, between his temples and around the back of his head, increasing and decreasing their speed on seemingly random occasions. After a while they seemed to calm down a bit and gain some sort of attraction to each other and, as they started to become drawn together, they mixed and merged into a dark brown smudge. The mist began to clear and Man, with much relief, began to make out a rather familiar hairy hand wafting air onto his face. Ape’s blurred face gave a sly smile.
      "I thought you planned to start on the rockery next weekend,"
      Man was not amused. He started to speak, at first with great difficulty.
      "Wh… Wh… Wha… W" Ape shook him a bit, "What the hell just happened?" He looked up to the boulder at the top of the hill.
      "If I’m to be brutally honest then I would have to say that I have no clue. It’s kind of ugly though,"
      Man’s mind began to clear.
      "Kind of ugly?" He screwed his face up in disgust, "It’s a bloody abomination, that’s what it is! I worked damn hard for three gruelling years to get my abode to the way it was and then in thirty seconds my life’s in tatters once again," He stood up, furiously brushed himself down and peered up at the devastation that surrounded the meteor, "And I’m left with nothing. Absolutely nothing…"
      "Except the charming presence of that rather large boulder," mused Ape glancing up the hill.
      Man scowled in his direction.
      "Well, thank God for small mercies. Perhaps I can befriend it!"
      Ape pondered this point for a second.
      "What, the rock? Oh, I wouldn’t bother with that. I’d guess from its current circumstance that it would somewhat dominate any relationship you might be inclined to form with it,"
      Man said nothing and instead glared sternly at Ape, wishing he would express at least some pity for his loss. He quickly decided this was futile and turned away from the upsetting scene on top of the hill. He closed his eyes and took three deep breaths. After this he turned round just in time to see Ape’s leg disappear behind the distant boulder.
      Man carefully surveyed the scene a bit more and let out a sigh. There was no doubt about it, the formally idyllic setting that he had inhabited for the past three years was now a complete mess. Once thriving trees had fallen pathetically, flower stems and petals had been brutally scattered amongst the grass and numerous bloodied small, brown tufts of fur were strewn pitifully across the land. I guess it’s all downhill from here, then, decided Man to himself as he started his ascent to where his hut used to stand, mentally kicking himself at the irony in his last thought.

      When Man reached the top, Ape was nowhere to be seen. Due to the ground in the area below being reasonably flat, from the top of the hill the human eye could see for miles and there was certainly no sign of any life in the vicinity, especially not that of the rather well groomed primate. Man was certainly bemused. He couldn’t see his monkey friend anywhere, and this worried him. He began to think that a search party may be in order but then decided that it would be too much bother to gather up all the reasonably evolved creatures in the area if they hadn’t already been made extinct by recent events.
      He turned his attention to the large spherical rock that had embedded itself into his property. It certainly had an interesting surface to it; coarse and knobbly all over. There were holes at random points all over the rock and Man couldn’t help but reach out his hand to examine one. It felt exactly as he had always expected a big, black boulder to feel. That is: cold and hard. It was so extreme in these two characteristics that Man felt a sudden overwhelming urge to shiver. He gave into it right away and performed the action, accompanied by the ridiculous "Brrrrr" sound that always seemed vital to getting the most out of a shiver.
      He had often pondered the usefulness of the "Brrrrr" sound and whether it had some important use in everyday life but had never found an answer, or rather he had, but it wasn’t as satisfying as he would have liked. Because, unwittingly, he had once asked Ape his opinion on the matter and Ape, being the kind of guy that he was, used it as an example of how ridiculous he thought evolution was, saying that if Man hadn’t been stupid enough to evolve out of a nice warm layer of fur in the first place then he wouldn’t have to worry about, as Ape phrased it, ‘all that shivering malarkey’.
      As he ended the shiver, Man jumped about a foot in the air. This wasn’t the usual practice for ending a shiver because that would have been energy wasting and over all an absurd thing to do. No, the reason he had followed the shiver with a large jump in the air was because someone had just shouted the word "Boo" very loudly into his right ear.
      Man looked up with distaste, shielding his eyes from the sun. Ape was crouched on top of the boulder grinning manically down at him. Man took a while to regain his composure.
      "I really wish you wouldn’t do that. You know what happened last time."
      "Yes. You fell over." said Ape, keeping the grin plastered on his face.
      "Yes Ape, I fell over," Man scowled, speaking through gritted teeth. "Although what you’ve clearly failed to remember is that what I ‘fell over’ was the edge of a rather high cliff."
      "Ah." Guilt ran rampant on Ape’s facial features. "A small oversight I think."
      "Yes. Small oversight, large drop. Where did you get that behaviour from anyway? You never used to do it."
      Ape resumed his usual grin.
      "Well, my friend, I acquired it through the beautiful process of trading." Man groaned in remembrance**, only helping to widen the monkey’s smile. "Yeah, some hobo came up to me the other week asking for a packet of grass seeds. He said he had nothing really to trade, except the amazing art of surprise. Of course I, being the ever inquisitive monkey that I was brought up to be, was taking in by this and asked him what on earth he meant. He gave me a quick demonstration and we did the swap. He told me it was a useful way of scaring the hell out of people when they were least expecting it and could be used at great advantage to one’s self. After that he left for the New Forest." Ape let out a husky laugh. "Of course then I took the initiative to follow him and jumped out in front of him halfway along the trail."
      "And?"
      Ape was beside himself with glee.
      "He dropped the packet of grass seeds and ran a mile in the other direction."
      "Hmmm…"
      Man cleared his mind of this nonsense and, once again, turned his attention to the large boulder buried into his property. It seemed to Man almost to have an air of nonchalance about it; something so cool and hard parked so neatly and calmly on top of three years’ hard work.
      "I can’t stand the thought of moving somewhere else because I love this spot so much. So what do I do? How do I move the boulder?" Man asked his monkey friend whilst still keeping both eyes on the rock.
      "Have you tried pushing it?" replied Ape. "We could roll it down the hill."
      "No, I think it’s too heavy for that. We’d need a lot of force to shift something so big. Good idea though."
      "How about hacking it away? I’ve got a couple of pick axes back at my place we’ve used before. We could always give them a go."
      Man looked doubtful, shaking his head.
      "You remember that mushy, rotting piece of dung we came across whilst digging out your back garden last summer?"
      Ape nodded.
      "This is harder."
      Ape considered this.
      "You know, I think it’s probably time I got some new pick axes."
      "I think you are probably right."

      Man slept round Ape’s house that night. It may have been a smelly old shack but it was a damn sight warmer than the open field that Man had been left with. The pair hadn’t come to a decision as to what to do with the intrusive boulder so they had left it for the night in an attempt to sleep on the problem. This seemed to help a lot and in the morning Ape was particularly pleased that he had managed to come up with a sensible solution. However, he refused to tell Man what it was. After a fulfilling breakfast of carrots and cress they gathered a few tools and bits of wood and headed over the hill to where Man’s place used to be.
      Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw when the boulder finally came into view. It was certainly a dramatic scene, although not a particularly pleasing one.
      "Bloody druids!" exclaimed Ape as they reached the bottom of the hill. "Leave something of marginal interest on the ground and within seconds they’re bloody there worshipping it."
      Man looked long and hard at the scene. Several naked men were prancing on the ground surrounding the rock. Round and round the top of the hill they danced, every so often turning themselves towards the centre where they would kneel and perform a gesture of worship towards the most disturbing sight of all. Standing, or rather hopping, on top of the boulder was a white-haired, naked, old woman. At each hop she performed, every ounce of saggy flesh attached to her bones would stretch and wobble, returning to its original repulsive form on landing. She did this to rhythm to her own ridiculous sounding chants of words that she was clearly making up as she went along.
      Man visibly cringed.
      "That’s disgusting." he noted aloud.
      "Damn right," agreed Ape. "Come on, let’s go and beat them away with sticks."
      They both instantly looked to the ground in search of armament. Unfortunately it seemed that there was only a small selection of leafy twigs in the local vicinity and they had to decide on another way to conquer the problem.
      "Ever negotiated?" asked Ape with a degree of hope in his voice.
      "No." answered Man, a bit worried as to what Ape had planned.
      "Well, it’s a bit like trading, but it’s a dealing of immaterial things. Let’s go and have a word."
      With that, Ape straightened himself up and marched towards the peak of the hill where much silly dancing and flesh wobbling was taking place. Man stood and huffed for a bit before following hurriedly after. When the two of them had made it to about three metres from the edge of the circle they stopped, amazed that the druids had not acknowledged their presence. They had continued prancing, seemingly oblivious to the two humanoids that had approached them.
      Ape leaned his head over to Man’s ear.
      "They don’t seem to give a monkeys about us," he whispered. "I’m figuring we should just beat them to death with our fists and be done with it."
      "No, no, no," replied Man hastily, shaking his head. "There must be a more civilised way to conduct such matters."
      "You’re damn right. Wait here."
      Ape turned from the scene and walked back down the side of the hill.
      "Where are you going?" hissed Man after him, but he heard no reply and the monkey was already gone from sight.
      Man turned back to the dancing, and then quickly away again in disgust as he caught the old woman landing a particularly flesh-shaking hop. He waited in fear for a while, longing for Ape to return. Then suddenly…

      "Boo!"
      Birds flew up from the ground around the hill where they had been searching for juicy worms. Man started backwards, tripping over his feet and falling hard on his backside. The naked male druids surrounding the boulder immediately stopped their dancing and threw their hands up in front of themselves before screaming loudly and scarpering down the hill. Meanwhile, the old woman on top of the rock ceased her insane rhythmic hopping and let out a loud "Ark!" before toppling unconsciously to the ground below. One of the male druids came back to help aid her escape from whatever it was they found themselves running from. He proceeded in dragging her limp, bedraggled body hastily away from the site. In a few seconds the hubbub was all over and the place was back as it had been the day before, in that Man found himself, again, looking up in a dazed fashion from the ground into the grinning face of Ape.
      "Works a treat doesn’t it?" Ape remarked, clearly still buzzing from the amount of mayhem he had just caused.
      "Yes," said Man, using his one arm to lift himself to his feet again. "I just wish you would refrain from doing it in my presence, that’s all. I’ve got a weak heart you know."
      "It’s better than you think," said Ape "If what the hobo said is true, you should be dead by now. Two scares. he said. Two scares and that’s it, you’re dead. Maybe I should practice more."
      Man groaned at Ape’s lack of care for the consequences of such a skill. He decided it wasn’t worth starting an argument and walked past Ape to the boulder beyond.
      "So what’s this fantastic plan of yours, then?" he shouted back over his shoulder.