These pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word ‘ingredient’ This week, one serious, one silly.

Capitol ingredient

You would think that the essential ingredient to any form of dictatorship would be blindingly obvious to even the most casual observer.

Especially when that ingredient is blind obedience to a leader who promises that the reward for that obedience is a future of unimaginable contentment and fulfilment, along with chest-bursting pride in your country and the vanquishment of all enemies that may threaten its future, and thus your future.

And when such a future is threatened from within by those opposed to the leader’s ambition for your national and personal best interests, you will happily go along with as many losses of rights to naysayers as the leader thinks necessary.

Until the time comes when it dawns on you and your neighbours that not everything that the leader says and does is necessarily in your best interests and one of your neighbours ventures to say so, only to end up in prison for ‘re-education’ or facing a firing squad.

And then you realise that while you were dreaming of an idyllic future, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, the rule of law and anything else that could curtail the leader have disappeared, he has become Leader for Life, and that you have become a slave.

And you remember your parents telling you that Hitler was elected and you recall saying to them ‘That was Germany, we’re Americans and he’s not like that’ as you went out the door on your way to the Capitol.

The Six Essential Ingredients for success in a Hollywood script – A writer’s guide

1. When a group of people is faced with a tidal wave, a volcano erupting, bombs falling etc, at least one character has to shout “We gotta get outa here!”
2. When the enemy tanks pour over the ridge playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on loudspeakers and firing rocket launchers, someone has to say “Wait, did you hear something?”
3. When someone’s partner walks in on them and finds them snorting coke and having group sex with several wombats, they have to say “Wait! I can explain! This isn’t what it looks like.”
4. When the last of the engines on your plane dies and it starts to nosedive, someone has to say “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
5. When Genghis Khan knocks on a chieftain’s door and tells him to hand over his lands or he’ll take them by force, the chieftain has to say “Oh, yeah. You and whose army?”
6. When a kidnap victim has to sit with their feet in cold custard and with their eyes taped open so they have to watch endless repeats of the Kardashians, the victim has to say “Why are you doing this to me?”

These two pieces were written in response to the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘canvas’.

Canvassing answers to canvas questions

1. Are all arguments about canvas in tents or are some just coarse and loosely woven?
2. Does shopping at a Russian canvas store increase the likelihood of Red sails in the sunset?
3. When your dog is a boxer, should you get him a canvas doggy bed or would that be bad for his self-esteem?
4. Is that self-portrait on canvas genuine art or did the painter just knock himself out while shadow boxing?
5. Does ‘circus tent’ have a certain ring to it or do you think all that romance is rigged?
6. Is camping under canvas now history, with all those guy tropes banned as people flap on about pole-itical correctness?

Blank canvas

After his gripping opening line about T E Lawrence’s alleged unnatural interest in camels, several hours later Wright A. Tome (doyen of the groaning airport book carousel) was still cussing the blinking cursor in a stentorian roar that could be heard in the next county.

His writer’s block had taken on the proportions of the Three Gorges Dam and he imagined that behind it lay a freshwater ocean of effortless plot development, illuminated by brilliant prose and a cast of characters that would have Hollywood producers killing each other to secure the rights.

Perhaps, he thought, if I reverted to my pre-laptop days and started again on paper this would trigger the literary floods of yore and I will soon be white-water rafting to another masterpiece.

A waste paper basket that filled and then began to resemble the abominable snowman soon put paid to that theory, so he wandered the room talking into a voice recorder, only to find the replays were as intelligible to him as haiku (Scottish highlands odes to cows).

Desperate, he fossicked out his old Royal Quiet de Luxe typewriter and, armed with a case of scotch and a carton of cigarettes, he tried to emulate Hemingway, only to wake with a splitting headache and QWERTY stamped on his face where he’d face-planted and slept like a petrified tree.

Deciding literature was a lost cause, he took up painting and became the new darling of the art world, especially after the Tate Modern paid $2 million to acquire his ironic modernist no-oil-on-canvas masterpiece,  ‘Polar bear in snowstorm’.

This piece was adapted for the Six Sentence Challenge with the prompt word ‘book’. For the original, click here.

Mervyn: Edgar, what are you doing?

Edgar: I’m working on my novel, a type of book that contains characters the author has invented.

Mervyn: What will this novel be about?

Edgar: About a man who has conversations with a Martian called Mervyn.

Mervyn: But I’m not invented and we do have conversations.

Edgar: Only if I say so, Mervyn.

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

1. Bert Mundane, lead singer of Nirvana tribute band, Smells Like Green Vomit. Married to Courtney Act.
2. Like, social media posts by, like, anyone with a vocabulary of, like, less than, like, 100 words (including, like, abbreviations and emojis) and who, like, has a Masters Degrees in, like, Eye-Rolling, Door Slamming and, like, Derr.
3. Made famous by Bob Geldof’s hit, ‘I Don’t Like Mundanes’, lifestyle of people with jobs, mortgages, 1.8 children, 0.5 dogs, 0.7 cats, weeds invading their lawn, neighbours who start their leaf-blowers at 7 a.m. on Sundays, cars that they hope will last them another couple of years, and who pay taxes and vote.
4. Mun-Dane – A particularly boring person from Denmark, derived from the Old Norse word ‘mun’, meaning ‘about as exciting as watching reindeers thinking’.
5. A condition that can lead to mundanity, a form of dementia that manifests itself in victims going grey, constantly losing their glasses, wearing a lot of beige, buying a recliner chair and yelling at the television.
6. Early English version of MoonDay (later Monday), still celebrated today by intoxicated young men sharing their assets from the windows of moving vehicles.

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

They animals had had enough and under the leadership of the big red kangaroo, RangaKanga (aka The Bouncer), they’d gathered to plot their revenge, with Baaaasil (aka The Human-Battering Ram) bleating that he was tired of being fleeced and having his offspring end up as Sunday lunch and Beardy the Goat (aka Billy The Kid) was sick of having his wives’ teats pulled for human consumption.

Ringnose (aka Raging Bull) wasn’t going to put up with being ridden for a bunch of clowns and artificial insemination had been the last straw, while Randy the rooster (aka Buck Buck McGurk) was sleeping in and urging the hens not to move off their eggs.

Harold the horse (aka Dirty Harry) had decided the only Derby he was entering in future would be a Demolition Derby and Hogsbreath (aka The Ham From Hell) had vowed that no-one was taking home his bacon.

Down the hill into the town they charged, with Ringnose taking out the china shop just for fun, Hogsbreath trampling a street full of outdoor diners who’d just begun devouring their crispy bacon and Randy gleefully pecking at all the Eggs Benedict devourers.

Beardy went hunting the biggest bellies he could find and the air rang with oofs, while Baaasil turned on the customers in Mrs. McGillicuddy’s Wool Shop, bleating ‘Hit one, hurl one’ as he rampaged, and Harold lashed out randomly with his hooves, whinnying with delight his battle cry, ‘Welcome to the Neigh-borhood’.

But the piece de resistance was left to RangaKanga, who boxed the Mayor and the Councillors into submission and herded them onto the nearby highway, into the path of the roaring trucks.

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

Being a card-carrying Member of the Geriatric Obstreperous Devils Motorcycle Club (aka the GOD Squad), there are many things for which I will not be seeking redemption any time soon, yea even though my deathbed moves a little closer with each passing day and the Grim Reaper is standing by to turn back the covers and send me on Eternity Leave.

I won’t be apologising to my grandchildren for taking every opportunity to hide their electronic devices, phones, chargers etc (under the green vegetables in the crisper works well) or for replacing my couches with beds of nails.

I will not be seeking the forgiveness of supermarkets and their entitled millennial customers for supergluing the self-serve checkouts and chatting amiably with my checkout person about the books I am reading currently and exchanging recipes for pea and ham soup.

Perish the thought of abasing myself towards those spawn-of-Satan politicians who seek my vote, despite the fact that every one of their previous promises has evaporated like a fart in the wind.

As for those neighbours who complain that I am ruining the streetscape by digging up the front lawn and planting vegetables, they can kiss my artichokes.

Yea, verily I say unto you that I will continue to make full use of my poetic licence and drive on any damn side of the road to writing Hell that I choose.

This piece was written in response to the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘scribe’.

In much the same way as there are Patron Saints (mine is St. Jude, Hope of the Hopeless), there are also Patron Demons, with one such being Titivillus, the source of error making and tempter into mischief of the mediaeval scribes who produced copies of the Bible.

Working from daylight to dusk, often in freezing temperatures, they were tasked with making immaculate exact copies and it was inevitable that there would be the occasional mistake, like the Word of Gob, or Sadam and Gomorrah, or the Virgin Merry.

Brother Anselm’s visitations from Titivillus were more likely to result in lewd scenes hidden in the background of an illustration of the Wedding at Cana or jokes scribbled in the margins about the Fish and Chip Monk.

Occasionally his devilish handiwork would be discovered by the humourless Scottish senior scribe (known as the Ayr Friar) and he would be required to say a thousand Hail Mary’s backwards without a mistake, but most slipped through unnoticed in a world not yet defiled by printers and word processors.

Until the fateful day that his monastery was chosen to present an example of their fine work to the Pope in Rome and the Bishop travelled many weeks to deliver the exquisite tome to His Holiness, one that Brother Anselm had transcribed.

The explosion could be heard around the Holy Roman Empire when the Pope discovered that his favorite passage had been transformed into ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no weevil’.