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

Initially, Lester thought it would be interesting to share a cell with Jake, an Australian, given that over the years he’d shared a toilet and washbasin with guys from almost all of the 50 States, but it wasn’t long before he realised his mistake.

Lester thought Jake was the kind of guy who could talk under wet cement and acted as though he believed that any time he closed his mouth he was going to die, so he kept talking just to be sure he was still alive.

Being six-foot six-inches and two axe handles across the shoulders and bearing biceps like beer barrels, Jake wasn’t the sort of guy you could tell to shut up and live to tell the story, and he hated to be ignored.

So day in and day out, Lester had to listen to Jake’s stories, descriptions of Australia’s lethal wildlife, journeys into his family tree, detailed explanations of how to rig up solutions to any mechanical problem imaginable in the Australian outback, and his bottomless pit of dreadful puns (e.g. are vampires bite-sexual?).

Finally, somewhere in the middle of a tale about Jake’s Uncle Bernie (who had six toes on his left foot and believed Aboriginal cave paintings were actually made by visiting aliens) carving a new piston out of hardwood while being attacked by drop bears, Lester snapped and began frothing at the mouth while screaming through the bars ‘Guard!’

As Lester was led away, Jake smiled and muttered to himself ‘Works every time’, assumed the lotus position and returned to his meditations on the mysteries of the universe, including whether if you went to a restaurant called Karma, would it serve just desserts?

Special bonus for Jenne and ceayr. If I could be another nationality, I’d be a Scot.

This piece has been adapted from a longer work about my days as a roadie for largely forgettable rock bands in the 1970’s. It responds to the Six Sentence Challenge prompt word of ‘band’.

This was a new band I was ‘auditioning’ for as their full-time roadie, in a sticky-carpeted outer suburban hotel where,  as the afternoon wore on and the band ground out their set and the beer flowed, a group of young men walked in and stood surveying the scene with cold eyes.

The hairs on the back of my neck told me all I needed to know as their leader strode to the bar, ordered a round of beers and marched through the dancing crowd until he got the result he wanted, a collision with a dancing man.

The fully intended brawl began and chaos ensued, with a chair sailing through the air and striking a heavily pregnant woman in the head and her partner hurling himself into the melee to ‘avenge’ her.

The band fled to the back lane, leaving me to defend their gear as best I could by shoving people off the stage with a mike stand and threatening brain damage with its base to the chief aggressors.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the barbarians left, laughing amongst themselves on their way out, proudly displaying their injuries and the band returned cautiously to watch as I restored order on stage and ask if I was OK.

I said, ‘Yeah, sure’ and as they headed to the bar, I made my exit and drove away. The band had failed the audition.

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

He had shape, in the sense that a woman bearing twins has shape but he carried it much lower, folded over his belt that was cinched to his hips, which led to wags saying that he had a veranda over his toy shop.

He had substance, in the sense that he was ‘comfortably off’, a euphemism for owning a two-storey mansion with 12 rooms and 5 bathrooms in a quiet leafy suburb where the closest thing to crime was your gardener mowing your lawn at an unseemly hour, several cars, a yacht, a private jet, and an unknown number of untraceable accounts in the Cayman Islands.

He had presence, in the sense of that indefinable confidence that comes with a private school education, an old boys network in every profession, an impeccable little black book of guys who know a guy who knows a guy that could fix any unpleasant attempted inroads into his fiefdom, and a bevy of judges and legislators whose penchant for social improprieties made them permanent targets for blackmail.

He had import, in the sense that he could always be relied on for a quote for the supine media from a ‘respected business figure’ expressing concern about the latest attempt by politicians to raise taxes or regulate industry and who was known to be a generous supporter of the arts and hospitals filled with machines that go ‘ping’.

He had spirit, in the sense of being seen as some sort of devil-may-care maverick who was unafraid to speak his mind when it came to business matters and the wave of political correctness that he saw as subverting the natural order of things, where everyone knew their place and stayed in it.

But most of all he had ‘form’, that quintessentially British term used to indicate that someone has a reputation for skullduggery, criminal wrongdoing and disdain for the social strictures placed on mere mortals but in his case somehow miraculously never resulted in charges being laid or convictions achieved, which is why, Your Honour, I had no option but to terminate him with extreme prejudice.

These pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘sin’.

Sin – Disambiguation from Wackypedia

Sin-22 – Catch-all for any sins we forgot first time around

Sincerity – That which once you can fake, you’ve got it made

‘Sin – Cry sometimes heard from the putting green

Syntax – Inexhaustible form of government revenue

Moccasin –  1. The sin of mockery             2. Adding chocolate to espresso coffee

Sinnindipity – The accidental discovery of someone who shares the same guilty pleasures

How Karen became AWESOME

Karen trawled the internet constantly, often feverishly, in search of evidence that the world was conspiring to bruise her soul at every turn and she was rarely disappointed, leaving her in a constant state of distress, a state she lamented to her ever-diminishing circle of online ‘friends’ (her real-life friends and family having long since departed the scene).

However, over time, she began to realise that her scattergun approach to attracting sympathy was simply not gaining her enough attention and she needed to find a way to harness an army of put-upon kindred souls that would one day crown her as the Queen of Outrageous Misfortune.

Slowly she crafted a conspiracy theory that centred on a Government plot to de-sensitise the citizenry to the daily assaults on their delicate and precious sense of self that she called the Toughen Up Plot (or TUP) and her acolytes became TUPpers, who brought forward endless stories of callousness that led to the scars known as ‘TUPper wear’.

The first to join in were the left-handed Catholics, closely followed by the victims of the ‘blue and green should never be seen’ tyranny, and then in quick succession, they were joined by vegans traumatised by ads for butcher shops, lottery losers not offered grief counselling and comfort dogs, University students in therapy because their lecturer mentioned a writer who was not ‘woke’, and mothers who breast-fed in public who felt blanked because no-one told them they were offended, and the list kept growing.

Karen was ecstatic; she had won the Internet but then, just as suddenly, she lost it.

She had succumbed to Andy Warhol Erasure Syndrome – Optimum Media Extent (aka AWESOME), in that she had become famous for 15 minutes and her time was up, which consigned her to a Living Hell of Irrelevance for indulging in the Sin of Pride, Subsection 2, Clause ii, ‘Preciousness’.

Bonus stoning scene – https://youtu.be/Cnn2aGVcCEc

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

Bert and Gladys were folding up the tent on their camper trailer when Bert said “Gladys, you know how we were sleeping in the space inside the tent last night?”

Gladys said ruefully “Well, you were doing most of the sleeping while I lay there listening to your snoring but, yes, I do recall we were in bed in the tent last night.”

Bert mused “So when we folded up the tent just now, where did the space go that was inside the tent?”

Gladys gave him one of those ‘is this one of the early warning gaga signs?’ looks and said “Bert, it didn’t go anywhere; it’s still there but now it’s not an enclosed space, it is now free space, unencumbered by tent-ness.”

“But how do you know we didn’t just fold up our space when we folded the tent and it will be released again when we unfold it next time?” questioned Bert.

“Bert”, said Gladys, ”I think we should just head home and from now on you can sleep in the garage, in the space in the tent, so you can be sure it doesn’t disappear, and I’ll be able to get lost in the infinite space of sleep.”

Footnote: The idea for this piece about ‘where does the space go?’ was inspired by the book ‘Divine Right’s Trip’ by Norman Gurney, which was originally printed in installments in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1971.