Loossers Foursome 2024-05-28 08-10-09 - 122-21 Min ❲SIMPLE · WORKFLOW❳

Next up was Priya, the engineer. She approached golf like a math problem she was failing. Her swing was a controlled flinch. Thwack. The ball shot hard left, ricocheted off a maintenance shed, and rolled to rest exactly two inches behind her own left heel. “Out of bounds,” she whispered. “And also behind me.”

Leo took the card. “Same time,” he said. “We’ll get ‘em next Tuesday.”

They wouldn’t. But they’d be there.

“We could just go to the bar,” Sam offered, holding up a ball he’d just dug out of a goose dropping. loossers foursome 2024-05-28 08-10-09 - 122-21 Min

The starter, an old man named Earl, didn’t even blink. He just wrote something down on a notepad.

The round was over. 122 minutes and 21 seconds of glorious, unspectacular failure.

The round lasted 122 minutes and 21 seconds. That was their true victory. Not the score—which was astronomical, something involving a nine on a par-three and a lost ball found in a squirrel’s nest—but the time. They were the fastest foursome on the course. Not because they were good, but because they had perfected the art of the . No practice swings. No long reads on putts. Just a brisk, heads-down march to wherever their ball had last been seen, followed by a quick hack and another march. Next up was Priya, the engineer

Silence. Then, Priya dropped her putter. Leo removed his hat. Sam just started laughing, a raw, wheezing sound.

By the ninth hole, they were seven over par as a team . Not per player. Total. On a par-36 front nine.

“No,” said Leo, squinting into the rising sun. “We finish. We always finish.” Thwack

She lined it up. The others stood frozen, holding their breath. The group behind them sighed.

Then came Sam, the group’s designated “good athlete who inexplicably chokes at golf.” He had shanked a warm-up putt so badly it had rolled into the creek. Now, with genuine terror in his eyes, he swung. The club slipped. The ball rocketed backward, missed Leo’s ear by a centimeter, and embedded itself in the base of the starter’s sign: “Welcome to Crestwood Pines.”

Maya putted.

“Same time?” he asked.