This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘eruption’. Gone for a creative non-fiction approach on this one.

Mount Tambora is a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia and in 1815 it produced the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

The ash from the eruption column dispersed around the world and in 1816 lowered global temperatures in an event sometimes known in the Northern Hemisphere as ‘The Year Without A Summer’.

Charles Dickens was aged four at the time and a Little Ice-Age affected London for several years afterwards.

Although he didn’t write A Christmas Carol until 1843, the childhood memories must have come flooding back as he started his work.

Ironically, Dickens main motivation was to expose British social attitudes towards poverty, particularly child poverty, but the story ended up creating an enduring middle class vision of feasting, roaring fires and Christmas carols.

In that sense, it seems that eruptions could be far more aptly called disruptions, in a world where the only constant revolutions are the spinning of the Earth that the meek are yet to inherit.

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

Ever since Bruce had his stroke, he doesn’t do much more than sit on his front veranda and, with his good hand, knuckle the head of his arthritic companion, a German Shepherd called Arfer, although these days the best that Bruce can manage is Ar’er but Arfer knows what he means.

Bruce can still shuffle-walk and dress and he prides himself on cleanly, if awkwardly, shaving each day with his safety razor, taking care to leave the electric one his daughter gave him on display in his bathroom, and being especially careful of nicks on the days she visits.

He looks at his now dead but once prized front lawn (groomed obsessively with his old Victa mower that he never saw any need to replace), where the children would play under the sprinkler in the summertime and where his son was once convinced he’d stood on a bee, creating drama until ice-cream was produced for distraction and the bindii prickle removed.

Every day his seemingly semi-comatose fat teenage grandson (named Jaxxon by his pea-brained parents,) the one with the tattoos and the safety pin through his eyebrow, arrives en route to the shops, never once lifting his eyes from his screen, even as he mumbles ‘Sup, Gramps’. He takes Arfer as his token protection, because his bark is still enough to scare away God-botherers and dodgy roof repair salesmen from Bruce and neighbourhood bullies from the boy.

The one thing Bruce looks forward to is the days that the aged care agency send their revolving door of male/female/gay/straight/non-binary shower people, not because he ever feels particularly unclean (he is obsessive with his wiping, if nothing else) but because it’s the only time anyone gently touches his skin since his wife went to Heaven without him.

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

Can you dig these ‘ere worms?

No point in a brand new pair of roller skates (even if you’ve got a brand new key)

when you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd,

especially since I heard it through the grapevine

that there’s a flying purple people eater

wearing a yellow polka dot bikini

on the highway to hell.

The key to good design

Engineer: “The key to understanding the need for this dam is that it’s designed to help cotton growers.”

Reporter: “So these would be irrigators that grow cotton to ship to Asia to be turned into T-shirts in sweat-shops and sent back to us to be turned into landfill?”

Engineer: “Well, we don’t dictate the market ….”

Reporter: “And the fact that the food farmers downstream of the dam will end up as peasants in their own country, is that dictated by the market as well?”

Engineer: “We’re running workshops for them on how they can adjust their business model.”

Reporter: “To businesses that don’t rely on water.”

Engineer: “I’m sorry, what’s your cotton-pickin’ point?”

These two pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘edge’. One for fun and one for reflection, and a bonus film clip.

-edge as a suffix (extract from Wackypedia)

‘edge – border for a Cockney garden

Straightedge – Cockney garden border after trimming

Knowledge – from the Old English ‘know ledge’, seat in exam room adjoining the Precipice of ‘F’

Foreknowledge – (Golfing term) knowing when you are about to be struck by a golf ball

Sandwedge – cheese between two slices of bread, snack often carried by golfers

Priviledge – bench in rich person’s outhouse

On the edge of reality

When Alex opened the fridge, there was fresh food in the house, so he reasoned he must have gone shopping.

He must have done because he had less money than he did yesterday and he remembered Annie at the shop apologising for having to give him so many coins in his change

It was increasingly important to have these reference points, although sometimes he was not really sure whether a day or even several days had passed.

It was sufficient to Alex’s purposes that he believed he was alive and could appear sufficiently coherent, because his soul-grinding fear was that ‘They’ would put him away in some sort of institution one day.

He didn’t believe he was mad or demented as much as disconnected from constants and attachments, which in his more reflective moments he conceded could be seen as madness by some. 

So he needed to be watchful and that seemed like a cruel and unusual punishment for a man who simply wanted to be left alone.