These pieces have been re-worked from two of my previous longer stories to meet the strictures of the Six Sentence Challenge and the prompt word ‘bookmark’.

Mark Martian and Eddie Earthling discuss novels

Mark Martian said to Eddie Earthling ‘Eddie, what are you doing?’ and Eddie replied ‘I’m writing a book, Mark, or a novel to be precise’ which led to Mark’s query ‘What is a novel?’

Eddie explained that it was a collection of pages with writing on them that contain a long story about characters the author has invented.

Mark looked puzzled and asked ‘What purpose do they serve?’ to which Eddie replied ‘People read them for their amusement.

Mark laughed and said ‘Why have your people never evolved?’ to which Eddie replied tartly ‘We’re working on it. In the meantime, I’m writing a novel.’

Realising that he may have offended Eddie, Mark said ‘So what will your ‘long story’ be about?’ to which Eddie replied ‘It’s about a man who has conversations with a Martian.’

Mark scoffed ‘But that’s not an invention, it’s true’ to which Eddie responded quietly ‘Only if I say so, Mark’ and returned to his keyboard.

Bach Pastorale

Geoffrey imagined a pastoral nirvana when he retired to his ramshackle country cottage.

As he broke up the hardened clay in the ‘garden’ of his new home, he saw a young lad dressed in torn jeans and a brand-name T-shirt, watching his place. In the city, he would have imagined the boy was probably hatching a plan to rob him but not here he smiled to himself and continued his labour.

Later that night, the boy looked into Geoffrey’s front room window and spied the layback chair where Geoffrey was stretched out, accompanied a half-empty whisky bottle, an ashtray full of butts, a tattered paperback with a chocolate wrapper as a bookmark and a thick, battered wallet.

Geoffrey wore a pair of large last century headphones, his eyes closed tightly and his arms gesturing rhythmically as he clutched a wooden spoon baton in his right hand, conducting the Bach concerto blaring from his speakers.

Geoffrey believed the myth that country people don’t lock their doors, so the boy entered easily and silently, grabbed the wallet and padded, in his stolen Nikes, into the welcoming night.

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This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘coffee’ (which is a name misleadingly given by Starbucks to 497 varieties of brown dishwater served in buckets to entitled millennial wannabes who place orders longer and louder than the Gettysburg Address).

Over coffee, Arabella was lamenting the loss of her latest boyfriend with her friend, Babs, when Babs interrupted to say that the trouble with Arabella was that she was far too serious and should be more bubbly.

Arabella was appalled by the idea of pretending to be an airhead to attract a man, so the next evening at a social event when a man approached her, before he could speak, she blurted out ‘I’m a committed environmentalist and I hate jokes.’

The man smiled and asked if she would accompany him to the Natural History Museum this Sunday to see the exhibition on the effects of plastics in oceans.

Agreeably surprised, Arabella agreed but when she arrived address he’d given her, he said he’d had a better idea and had hired a boat so they could go looking for dolphins, which delighted Arabella even more.

However, mid-boat-trip, he stopped the engine, dropped his pants and lunged at her, with his willie wagging like a metronome.

Arabella’s self-defense training kicked in instinctively and, while the man was still groin-groaning, she threw him overboard, ignoring his pleas that he couldn’t swim, and as his last effervescence rose to the surface, she immediately felt …. more bubbly.

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

Stop me if you’ve heard this but there’s this woman who’s dumped her gaslighting partner and exchanged him for a new bloke she’s pretty keen on.

Being a modern liberated woman, she decides to take the initiative and says to him (bold as brass) “I think we should move in together and I want a life commitment.”

And the bloke goes, “Nah, those things are always breakin’ down and they cost too much to repair.”

So the woman goes, “So why don’t we build a better one then, one with lots of spare love, a big, beautiful bed and no boredom allowed?”

And the bloke thinks for a while then goes, “Alright, alright, but there’s a few conditions.”

So she listens and she listens and she listens,

and then she goes, she goes,

she goes

away.

These two pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘labyrinth’. There is a tenuous connection between them for the eagle-eyed but I hope they can each stand alone, even though they’re together. 😉

Before entering the labyrinth

In 1958, Maxwell Stuart, an Indigenous man was arrested for the murder of a nine-year-old white girl in the remote South Australian town of Ceduna.

Stuart was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, a decision that was upheld on two appeals and a subsequent Royal Commission investigation, headed by the same Judge who had originally convicted Stuart.

On death row, Stuart met a Catholic priest, who was the first to ask questions about the ‘confession’ beaten out of him by the Police and this pricked the interest of the editor of the Adelaide News.

The News began featuring explosive stories unfolding new details of the case showing that Stuart couldn’t possibly have been guilty, sparking a huge increase in the paper’s circulation, and the newspaper heavily funded a campaign against the death penalty, targeting then South Australian Premier, Thomas Playford, who eventually, reluctantly, commuted Stuart’s penalty to life imprisonment.

After 11 years in jail and decades of parole, Stuart went on to lead a second life as a respected tribal Arrente man, welcoming the Queen to Alice Springs on at least one occasion.

That crusading Editor of the Adelaide News was Rupert Murdoch.

Location: Lab, Yrinth

I was in my lab in Yrinth (the lesser known sister city to Corinth), being interviewed by Cosimo Politanous, the alleged ‘science writer’ from the Yrinth Truth, a tabloid in the Murdokipedes media empire.

Having hastily signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, Cosimo feigned the ignorance of the innocent enquirer and asked, “Is it possible, through your work on the hidden pathways of the brain, to navigate to the source of a lie and, if so, is it possible to remove that source, so that no further lies can be generated?”

Not fooled for a moment, I poured him a glass of my best ouzo and jested “If you are asking ‘are we on the verge of a brain-based version of Google Maps?’ then the answer has to be ‘no’; we are still in the realms of mud maps, a concept with which your newspaper is no doubt familiar.’

Cosimo was nothing if not nimble and, hoping to catch me off guard, said “So the rumours that you are on the verge of being able to re-write the labyrinthine brain circuits of conspiracy theorists, politicians and climate deniers for the benefit of society are untrue?”

I stood to indicate the interview was over and Cosimo sighed, downed his ouzo in one gulp, put away his notebook, and then suddenly pitched face forward onto my lab bench.

I picked up the phone, called my assistant, Melina Megastarkis, and said ‘Doctor, I have the newest volunteer for your research, complete with his signed consent form.’

These two less than serious tales are in response to the Six Sentence Challenge presented each week at Girlie on the Edge, with the prompt word of ‘strike’.

Beaten by a stretch

As the striker on the old stadium clock struck six, Steve ‘Stinky’ Stilton swung three bats to stretch his stiff arms, all the time chanting in his staccato stentorian voice ‘Today I will not strike out!’

When it came to his turn to bat, he manfully stemmed all thoughts of distress and strife, stepped up to the plate and stared at Sebastian ‘Stretch’ Santanna on the steppe known as the mound.

Stretch wound up and, with striations bulging on his pitching hand, hurled a white satellite in Stinky’s direction and he watched it seem to orbit the strike zone before landing slap in Solomon ‘Stumblebum’ Silverstein’s catcher’s glove and the umpire, Segacious ‘Sightless’ Schickelgruber’s voice howled ‘Steeeeerike 1’, stabbing his finger into the ether.

Stinky steadied his sticky resin-coated hands and blinked away the sweat beginning to stream down his brow and stated firmly to himself ‘Saw that coming, all part of the plan, stew in your juice, Stretch.’

Stretch arched his slender spine and span like a top before delivering his famous well-disguised sliding gesunder ball, with a vicious curve at the end, that steered clear of the edge of Stinky’s bat as he swung, creating an air stream that rivalled Hurricane Katrina, and Sightless yodeled ‘Steeerike 2’.

Mustering all of his muscular and mental strength, Stinky picked the straight-as-a-die sucker ball emerging from Stretch’s fingers and felt the tinny but satisfying thwack of aluminium on leather and then saw in horror that the ball had lodged teeth-shatteringly in Stretch’s mouth, as Sightless intoned ‘Batter out’ and swept his arm toward the bench.

Diogenes, dodgy knees and doggedness – Extract from Wackypedia

Diogenes, the Ancient Greek, lived in a clay wine barrel and laughed at the pretensions of men, hence the expression ‘a barrel of laughs’.

He carried a lamp in broad daylight in his search for a man, arguing that the brainless residents of Athens did not qualify for that term.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes he asked if there was anything he could do for him and Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, get out of my sunlight. I need to warm my dodgy knees.’

He was often called dog-like, which he took as a compliment because he believed dogs live in the present without anxiety, have no use for the pretensions of abstract philosophy, and instinctively know who is friend and who is foe.

Where he differed, he would often say, was in the fact that ‘other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends, to save them’.

The first cosmopolitan (he invented the word), he was stateless, homeless, shameless and free, on strike from alleged civilisation.