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.

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?”