Author: Doug Jacquier

Pathways

/ Doug Jacquier / 18 Comments

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

Path-ology

(Acknowledgement – I am indebted to Perambulation T. Biped, Professor of Path-ology at Forkintheroad University, for providing the following definitions and clarifications for new students of this discipline.)

Psycho-path – Walking trail to the Bates Motel – not to be confused with cycle path, the home of MAMMILs (Middle Aged Men In Lycra)

Path-OS – A very wide path

Patho-logical – Addicted to the shortest distance between two points (not to be confused with path-illogical, the propensity to wander around aimlessly carrying a water bottle)

Naturo-path – Trail used by nudists

Homeo-path – Navigation system used by pigeons

Sidewalk – mythological (US) means of progressing along a footpath while remaining horizontal

Spike’s final resting place

As Phoebe drove home with her husband, Spike, strapped into the passenger seat, she decided it was time for some home truths.

‘Spike, in all our married years, never once did you praise anything I did or nourish me when it mattered. Far from putting me on a pedestal, you never missed an opportunity to put down my ‘stupidity’.’

Silence.

Phoebe arrived home, unstrapped Spike’s urn and removed the lid. She emptied his ashes into the instant-mix concrete slurry and completed her path to the front gate.

‘You can look up to me now, Spike. Every day.’

PLUS – Shameless plug for my new short fiction collection ‘On the verge of extinction’ just published on Amazon (digital and print versions available). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7L4JYJY

Quarry Light by Edie Meade

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Limestone country, where the quarry growls in heat thunder over the fields: we’re driving to find the place Dad wanted his ashes interred. Tonight Mark and I bring the boys to a cabin so quiet we can hear the electric lines of the high pylons hum through the easement.

We take a creekbed for our evening walk. Limestone bears fossils and slips of gray clay, mayapples, mint and touch-me-nots alive with damselflies. I know them like old friends – comfortable even decades later because they represent the nothing-times, those stick-digging days when little needed to be said.

At nightfall, we walk back to the cabin along an access road white with crushed gravel. The kids rush through puddles made by over-payload dump trucks. Frogs hop out ahead, unafraid. None of us are afraid, somehow, out here. Quarry light brings a lingering, thick sunset and I realize how much beauty there…

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Martian towards Bach

/ Doug Jacquier / 18 Comments

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.

+ Shameless Plug

I am delighted to announce the launch of my collection of short fiction, ‘On the verge of extinction’, now available at Amazon.com in the US https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7L4JYJY and at https://tinyurl.com/mt3f7yp4 in Australia and https://tinyurl.com/3c6bv3rp in the UK. If you are a Kindle Unlimited member, it’s free anywhere!

Any and all support will be gratefully received.

On the verge of extinction

More bubbly

/ Doug Jacquier / 23 Comments

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.

Beyond a joke

/ Doug Jacquier / 29 Comments

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.

My right to a peaceful death

/ Doug Jacquier / 8 Comments

Warning: This piece of mine discusses death and assisted suicide. If you are not open to discussion on these topics, just move right along to the next post on your list. And be assured, this is not a situation I am currently contemplating. 😉

From the UN Declaration on Human Rights
Article 1All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.Article 5No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.I assert my right to die when I choose and to do so peacefully, with the assistance of modern science…
In all of the ponderous discussions in public and in various legislatures about assisted dying, my rights in this matter do not rate a mention, let alone receive protection.
There is no questioning of the role of the State or the medical profession as central players nor of the focus exclusively on terminal cases near to death. Any notion of the right to die with dignity at a point of your own choosing is totally ignored.At the moment, some jurisdictions have implemented or are on the verge of implementing various versions of assisted dying legislation. All of these centre on two core elements: the person must have a terminal illness (and must be certified as coherent and not depressed) and a bevy of medical people will decide who has access to the procedure.These provisions clearly exclude people who are in excruciating agony but are not going to die very soon, people with long term or acquired disabilities that make their life a misery, and people who have decided that there is little point in their continued existence for a multitude of reasons but don’t want to die violently, to name but a few categories.
Even more importantly, they exclude people who want to express their wishes when they are of sound mind and body to have their life terminated under certain conditions that may occur in the future e.g. they are demented and don’t know who anybody is anymore, they are reduced to sitting drugged in a nursing home having food forced in one end and wiped up at the other, they are in a coma and unlikely to recover etc.It is indisputable that many people remain on this mortal coil due to highly profitable drugs and eye-wateringly expensive health services. And of course many of the medically compromised are so as a result of the self-inflicted wounds of over-indulgence in food, smoking and alcohol.I know of what I speak because I fit into all of those risk groups but if you thought this aside was to be an episode of True Confessions you will be disappointed. And of course the ultimate irony is that over a lifetime I have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes on those items to the benefit of the accidentally injured and unwell.But what if I decide not to be part of the health care system in my later life and choose to get out of everybody’s road. Say I have been diagnosed with lung cancer, for argument’s sake. The medical profession would want to put me through months of chemo, radiation and whatever other experimental treatments they’ve invented recently, accompanied by the use of lots highly expensive machines that go ping.
Almost certainly I’d be in pain and discomfort throughout. Then, eventually, when the doctors agree that my illness is terminal and incurable, I would have to apply for permission to go, which wouldn’t be granted if they decide I’m depressed. Let me put it to you that depression would be the only rational response in that scenario.How we got here, in my view, is that gradually the idea that we all should be allowed, and want to, to live as long as possible, in any condition possible, has taken over any rational analysis by both electors and governments and abolished any notion of the cycle of life.Most people over 60 have had more than enough time to live a productive life through spawning and nurturing the next generation, growing food, making things, fixing things, selling things, teaching, writing a novel or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. Without major medical interventions and medications, most would pop their clogs in their seventies, with a smaller cohort winning the lottery of life into their eighties and beyond.If anyone ever bothered to ask them, on a confidential basis, I believe the vast majority of older people would say they would like to have the choice to depart this life peacefully and painlessly when their body, and more importantly, their brain, fails them to the point of incapacity. Many signal this openly through a range of end-of-life instructions, including Do Not Resuscitate (DNR).
However even when they leave strict instructions in this regard, their wishes are often ignored by doctors and families who refuse to come to grips with their own mortality and are, in fact, the real underminers of ‘God’s will’ or the natural cycle of life (whichever you prefer.) What we would do in the blink of an eye for a suffering pet suddenly becomes unthinkable.Those who have the physical capacity, but have been denied a humane ending, are condemned to do violence to themselves. It would seem society would prefer you left a mess for emergency services to clean up when people shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or slit their writs in the bath or drown at sea. Where is the compassion, let alone the common decency, to recognise what the UN calls cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?
Economically and socially, we have created a society where mere existence trumps a meaningful life and an entire industry has grown up to cash in on it and beggar the following generations in the process. The net result is that we have developed an unsustainable health care system and an aged care system that is eating up an increasing proportion of our GDP and beggaring the futures of the generations that follow. For example, several studies have shown that the cost of futile end-of-life treatments alone add up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think we need a society that accepts the adult individual’s right to depart this mortal coil as and when they please without stigma, without interference from laws, doctors or families, and with the as-of-right assistance of drugs that make that possible. In the name of all things humane, let me go when I want to and not when society decides to give me an early minute.

Hi ho the merry-o, a’mazing we will go

/ Doug Jacquier / 23 Comments

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.’