This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘play’. It’s basically true, allowing for some poetic license and what time does to memories, and I only publish it as a very poor confession for a thoughtless act.

In my callow and thoughtless youth, I was a budding and ambitious thespian who grabbed at the offer to be stage manager in a touring production of a play, with the bonus of also having a very small part, as a black English sailor.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I am not now, nor was I then, black but a ginger-haired Anglo-Saxon who, with the aid of a crew cut and voluminous amounts of make-up was up for the challenge,  rationalising my decision on the basis that persons of colour were rare in the theatre in 1960’s Australia.

One night after the show, a smartly dressed woman waited around afterwards and, after introducing herself as the wife of the Colonel at the local Army base, insisted we come to their home for supper and wouldn’t hear of me waiting to remove my make-up.

When the cast arrived at the grand house and trooped into a living room that would have served well as the setting of the final scene in an Agatha Christie mystery, a maid was despatched to prepare tea and supper and to fetch the Colonel.

Soon the Colonel made an appearance and, without batting an eyelid, marched over to me, shook my black make-up caked hand and said ‘Welcome, you look like you could do with a scotch’ and then chatted to me amiably, as if fake black men were regular visitors to his home and that they always left black stains on his expensive scotch glasses.

When we finally grasped the chance to say our farewells, the Colonel once again gripped my hand and intimated in a low voice that I was the least convincing black man he’d ever seen and that perhaps other roles might suit me better.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘energy’.

With my eyesight rapidly fading, I’m forced to type using a dictation app (so please excuse any Type O’s and things I oughta correct) and I’m reduced to getting my news from the radio and podcasts, but I’m not sure that what I’m hearing is any more reliable.

Having recently recovered from a hardy tack after I got my electricity bill, I keep hearing about the Lou Ming energy crisis and I’m wondering who the hell is Lou Ming and why is his bill more important than mine?

Yesterday I’m sure I heard some Russian guy called Vladimir, put in a call to nuke rain and I was left wondering, is there a big drought over there that hasn’t been mentioned in the whether reports?

I’ve been following an Australia health podcaster (who I think is called the Can Guru) who says the devil is in the tail when it comes to dieting and apparently we all need to exorcise more but I find it just makes my head spin, not to mention my nether region.

I don’t know what to make of a story I heard about Trump running again (from the look of him he’s never run in his life) but maybe it was about him having the runs because apparently he might still go to jail for hoarding after the FBI found far too much paper in his bathroom.

But the last straw for me was some preacher saying we spend too much time contemplating our navels and I was left wondering what thinking about ships or oranges has got to do with the coming rapster.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Story Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘branch’.

I was halfway through reading out a news story about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall when Ken Oath, as was his wont, interrupted to branch off into ‘That reminds me of the dreadful potholes that appeared in my street after the Flood of 1985, even though the river height didn’t match the Great Deluge of 1919, as related to me by my grandfather’.

Careful not to draw breath he continued, ‘Speaking of my grandfather, I remember how I used to have to clock on and off at the surgical truss factory where I completed my apprenticeship in the French polishing of rubber goods, only to be made redundant by steady improvements in hernia surgery.’

The word ‘rubber’ in turn triggered a sniggering schoolboy tale about an imported American school teacher who was shocked when one of her students asked for a rubber in class, only to discover later that this was the Australian term for an eraser; ‘Oh, how we laughed’ quoth Ken, with one of those fake snorts people make with the back of their hand to their nose.

Inevitably, he followed that with ‘Did I ever tell you I once had a share in a racehorse called Goosey Gander, whose only claim to fame was finishing third in a three-horse race in the mud at Manangatang and only then after surviving a stewards’ inquiry into why he was being ridden by a wombat?’

As if only just realising it, he feigned apology for his digression but stated that he had in fact returned the conversation to the subject of holes, given the propensity of wombats to dig them and asked if I forgave him.

Looking up, I noticed I was late, found my coat and grabbed my hat and made the bus in seconds flat, hoping that Ken would one day blow his mind out in a car through not noticing the lights had changed.

With apologies to The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ https://youtu.be/usNsCeOV4GM

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘structure’. What the hell it means I have no idea. 😉

To describe what Jerry had built as a ‘structure’ strained the definition to breaking point and made Escher’s multi-dimensional fantasies seem like a housing project blueprint in comparison.

The foundations, to the extent that they existed at all, consisted of a tissue of lies laid haphazardly on top of the quicksand of his adolescent fantasies of transcending his mundane suburban origins.

The walls seemed like Japanese-style internal sliders but were made of little more than recycled pizza boxes covered in a decoupage of graduation certificates, attendance records, little athletics participation ribbons and degrees purchased from the Oxbridge Online University.

The floors (or, more correctly, flaws) comprised remaindered books rescued from a rubbish skip, including ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump’, ‘1001 Ways With Tripe’ and ‘Brain Surgery For Dummies’.

The doors had been salvaged from building site toilets that had reached their use-by date, complete with graffiti of historical significance on the insides, such as ‘Call Samantha for a good time’, ‘Quinoa causes cancer’ and ‘Gravity sucks’.

Immediately after its completion, with a roof consisting of knitted strands of titanium barbed wire designed to both deter pigeons and block the mind controllers, Jerry invited architectural prophets to review his edifice and their words are written on the Subway walls.

This piece was adapted from an earlier piece of mine for the Six Sentence Challenge, for the prompt word of ‘film’.

I’ve picked up a job as an extra in the Coen brothers’ new film, ‘Fargo Is No Country For Old Men’, starring Nicole Theron, and I’m Customer No. 3 on the set of the Transylvania Bar, the one with the bushy beard and mostly in shadow, so no-one picks up on the fangs.

At lunch Nicole sits, alone, under a giant beach umbrella, wearing dark shades (just like mine) and her caked-on make-up gives her skin the look of alabaster as she sips her Rhesus Negative Highball.

We each look over the top of our shades and spiral into each other’s vampiric vortex and she says ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’, leaving me to fumble through my pockets and find a pen and a dollar bill, and she writes in tiny script in the space next to Washington’s head.

She leans toward me and breathes urgently ‘The gods have brought us together but tonight I fly out to my castle in the Carpathians and you must meet me at the address I’ve written on the bill and come with me.’

I head home to pack (what do you pack for an indefinite stay in a castle?) and, stepping out of the cab in front of my apartment building, I see near the entrance a pathetic old man sitting on cardboard to protect him from the rapidly freezing footpath and silently proffering a paper cup, more in hope than expectation, but I take the dollar from my top pocket and drop it in to his cup. Inside my apartment front door, I realise with horror what I have done and, in panic, I return to the street, where the homeless man is nowhere in sight.