Toying with the beginning of a new story idea. It starts something like this:

Blast from the Past
After draining a par-saving 20-foot putt and settling back onto the driver’s seat of his golf cart, Mike took a swig of water as he picked up his iPhone to check email. The three others in his foursome were all finishing the 14th hole when Mike looked at his in-box and watched as his whole world exploded into a billion pieces of kaleidoscopic light.

There was only one new email but the name shining up at him from the screen burned like a laser as the phone receded with his hands down an ever-lengthening tunnel. Mike was jolted back to the golf course when Tom dumped his putter into the bag strapped to the rear of the cart and settled with a thud into the passenger seat.

“Nice par, dude,” Tom said. “Put me down for a six.” “Thanks,” Mike muttered as he looked over at Tom and then dropped his iPhone back into the drink-holder on the golf cart’s dashboard. He turned back and grabbed the stubby pencil to mark the scorecard lashed to the steering wheel. Then he put his foot on the accelerator and led the way to the next hole.

Mike was first to tee off on the 15th and it did not go well. His tee shot sliced like a fighter jet banking hard right in a dogfight, disappearing into the hardwood forest lining the fairway and prompting catcalls from his three golf partners — his oldest friends. “Ahhhh, shit,” he mumbled. “Guess I’ll use my mulligan on that one,” and he placed a second golf ball and tee in the grass. The second shot stayed in the fairway but went half as far as his typical 275-yard drives.

“The wheels are coming off, boys!” Tom hollered. “We may yet take some money off this guy.”

Two chunked fairway irons and a pitching wedge got Mike’s ball onto the green, where two overly cautious putts left him a couple of feet short of the hole. Tom called it a gimme and tossed Mike his ball.

Mike’s drive on the par-three 16th was a line drive straight into the water between the tee box and the green; he had an uneventful bogey on the 17th and shot a snowman on the par-five 18th.

Between every shot, he lifted his phone before his face and stared at the screen.