This micro piece managed 3rd place (and a small sum of money, for which I am very grateful) in this mini-competition run by On The Premises. https://onthepremises.com/minis/mini_57/

btw I thought the top story in the Honorable Mentions deserved to be placed but who am I to say? 🙂

This piece was written for the Unicorn weekly photo challenge provided by Ms. Gray and Mr. Ayr.

‘So who’s the bloke in the foreground there?’

‘Ah, that’s Le Maitre Du Pigeons. Master of the pigeons. He looks after all the pigeons in the lofts you see at the top of the building. Feeds them, cleans up the pigeon stools, that sort of thing.’

‘Then what’s the building?’

‘Le Bureau de Poste Pigeon. The Pigeon Post Office.’

‘Why on earth would anyone be sending messages via pigeons these days?’

‘Simple. You can’t hack a pigeon. Untraceable communication written in unbreakable code known only to the sender and the recipient. Silicon Valley and Western intelligence hate them with a passion but Russia and China can hardly breed them fast enough.’

‘But couldn’t snipers with high powered telescopic rifles pick them off?’

‘Perhaps. But which ones in the daily flocks in the thousands? Entirely impractical. Besides, they’re protected under EU data rules’

‘Clever thinking but they do come with risks. They’re not called ‘rats with wings’ for nothing. With bird flu rampant, they could trigger another epidemic.’

‘Well, they might but, at some point in modern life, something or someone is going to excrete on you from a great height. I don’t know about you but I think I’d prefer that to descend from a bunch of flocking pigeons than from a bunch of privacy-invading flying elephants.’

‘So do you think those multinationals have buildings that house massive flying elephant lofts?’

‘Now you’re letting your imagination run away with you. Do something useful and get us another pint.’

Appropriate bonus clip https://youtu.be/pj0_Ps5c08I

This piece is in response to The Unicorn Weekly Challenge to write up to 250 words based on a photo prompt.

Elspeth had loved moving from Australia to their cottage in Spain when Derek had retired. The steep steps had made them feel on top of the world. They thought of themselves as exotic mountain goats, especially after they returned home each evening from the tapas bar, having usually had one too many sangrias.

Now Derek had gone off to Eternity to save them a spot and each day she longed more and more to join him. Like the succulents they had planted, her limbs were thick and fleshy and her swollen feet were no longer adapted to this environment. Unlike them, her need for water to cope with the heat had become obsessive and she paid the grocer’s boy to carry the big plastic bottles up to her eyrie.

One balmy autumn night, she decided she was well enough to go down to the tapas bar, for old time’s sake. When she’d finished her meal and started home, she thought ‘You’re just a silly old goat now and the mountain is too high.’ But she convinced herself that if she took it slowly, all would be well.

She made it but was far from well and joined the fallen leaves on the ground. Before her eyes closed, she looked at the garden bed and smiled to herself as she thought ‘Well, I’m cactus* too now.’

The grocer’s boy found her and called an ambulance, after he’d emptied her purse. He reasoned that she didn’t need money in Eternity.

*Australian slang for dead or broken

This piece was written for The Unicorn Challenge, a weekly photo prompt for up to 250 words of prose.

Oh, that view. It’s idyllic here in Lower Sidebottom.

Yes, it is. Now.

Was there a problem in the past?

Yes. Before the Great Purge of 2022.

What do you mean?

We’d been inundated by sea changers, Gen-alphabets, lawyers, car salesman, politicians and social influencers. All the scum of the Earth.

So what did you do?

Nature took care of it with the Lower Sidebottom Tick.

I’ve never heard of that.

I’m not surprised. We locals had always known about it and we’d developed herd immunity. But with climate change, the ticks had bred up and the interlopers started getting bitten. We told them the effects were worse than Lyme Disease.

But surely they would have checked with health authorities.

Oh, they did. But we’d warned them the authorities would lie to prevent panic spreading across the country and, given the modern propensity towards conspiracy theories, they believed us.

And did it work?

As you can see, it did. Now outsiders won’t even visit, let alone live here. Hence the absence of luxury yachts, surf-skis, health food franchises, gastropubs and other abominations.

Extraordinary. On a more pleasant note, it’s a beautiful garden you have here, full of all sorts of exotic plants.

Yes, they make an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of insects. Would you like a tour? Best to tuck your trousers into your socks.

Sorry, must run. I’ve got a yoga class and I need to pick up some kambucha along the way. Another time perhaps.

This piece of photo prompt insanity was written for the weekly Unicorn Challenge and this week it stars the progenitors of said challenge in all their Gallic philosophical finery.

CE: Damn, the road is closed.

Jenne: But only for 0 metres.

CE: So it’s not closed?

Jenne: Of course it is. That’s why the barrier is there. To prevent people from going 0 metres. You know what some people are like. Give them a centimetre and they’ll take a metre.

CE: So if we didn’t want to go more than 0 metres we wouldn’t be concerned about the road closure? This is the Catch-22 of road closures. If we wanted to go more than 0 metres, then this is not the road we should be on. Only crazy people would want to be on a road that’s closed for 0 metres. So sane people would not be on this road.

Jenne: Exactly. We are the problem.

CE: I suppose we could always cycle or walk.

Jenne: Then what would we do with the car?

CE: We’d come back for it after we’ve done what we came to do?

Jenne: But what if they re-open it while we’re not here? We’d be blocking the road and people would be upset.

CE: Well, we’d just have to explain we were only gone for 0 minutes. Hardly any inconvenience to a reasonable person.

Jenne: Excellent! We could even say that, like Schrodinger’s cat, we may or may not have been gone at all. That would teach them not to mess with a couple of canny Scots in the home country of Jean-Paul Satire.

A wee bit of what passes for teenage romance this week, in response to the photo prompt posted in the Unicorn Challenge .

It was in the shadows behind the wall, just before that first streetlight, that I made my first fumbling teenage attempts at taking the virginity of Wendy Posingthwaite, the vicar’s daughter. I knew she liked me because she totally ignored me, except for when she whispered behind her hand to her girlfriends and they’d all burst out laughing.

One Saturday night, after the Blue Light Disco, she let me walk her home. Well, at least she didn’t say anything when I followed her and, besides, she lived next door. As we neared her front gate, she stopped and steered me behind the wall and gave me my first kiss, a kiss that seemed to last forever, until she said, like a bad ventriloquist, ‘Ar aces are uck ether’. She meant ‘our braces are stuck together’.

As randy opportunistic teenage boys are wont to do, I took advantage of the situation to attempt to unhook her bra, at which point, suspiciously quickly, our braces were suddenly unmeshed. She slapped my face and ran off laughing and I began to imagine how quickly her tale would spread around the school.

We weren’t Catholics so I don’t imagine her father could have me excommunicated from our church but he could tell my parents, a fate worse than death in our household. In the end, it seemed she didn’t tell anyone and next week, after the disco, she waited for me outside and I noticed she’d taken off her braces.