This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘wear’. I’ve actually had a few pieces accepted this week but I decided not to waste a good whinge. 🙂

All these rejections are starting to wear me down (if they were the old paper rejection slips I’d have enough to refurbish the interior of the Sydney Opera House), so I’ve decided to create a few of my own writer sites to ensure I get published somewhere.

The first off the drawing board is the logical extension of the Alphabet Soup of gender/sexual identity in that it will particularly focus on Z writers i.e. zoologically-indeterminate, non-binary in terms of species and those transitioning to a new species (e.g. I’m on a journey to becoming a wombat).

Next will be ‘I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms’ for those feeing unloved and/or hated, like pun-addicted formerly redheaded men, women who remain effortlessly thin, and vegans.

Work is well-advanced on ‘Put another prawn on the barbie’ for recalcitrant Australian writers who insist on having a ‘u’ in ‘colour’, incorrigibly mention places unfamiliar to anyone west of Hawaii and stubbornly insist on local vernacular (e.g. as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike).

Sure to be popular is ‘I only see dead people’ for writers who are genetically incapable of imagining fairies, dragons and apocalyptic futures (e.g. Donald Trump winning a second term and declaring himself President for Life).

Finally, I’m sure I had plans for those afflicted by short-term memory loss (I can’t find them where I’m sure I left them) but I know there should be an outlet for such masterpieces as ‘Call me … damn that whale, he’s even wrecked my memory’ and ‘It was the best of times, it was …. half-past four, I think’.

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

When the Feds descended on the Give-Me-The-Juice Bar, customers scrambled for the exits and the owners tried to destroy the evidence down the sinks and toilet bowls, but to no avail; the jigger was up.

Damning evidence presented to the Courts included a grainy white residue in the glasses of customers who’d ordered the Colombian Cola (snorting straws an optional extra).

The house special, The Highball, was based on wheatgrass but with a liberal dose of non-industrial hemp and was easily located through the large collection of munchie plates surrounding its imbibers.

The Mexican Tropical turned out to be mescaline with orange juice and steroid sprinkles, leading to Keystone Kops capers on the street as officers tried to wrestle down drinkers chasing butterflies in traffic.

The Mood Swing Smoothie seemed innocent enough until it was analysed and they found the traces of Mother’s Little Helpers.

Ultimately, all of the customers were released when the duty lawyer pointed out that police officers had consumed some of the evidence and had contaminated the crime scene for a very, very long time.

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

• Express
  1. (v) exude through the pores, as in emotion, words, milk, sweat, BO, unctuousness, and conspiracy theories
  2. (adj) commonly used to describe the speed of bullet trains but in fact not as fast as Superman

• Espresso
  1. (n) Actual coffee (not Starbuck’s 364 variations on dirty water in a bucket)
  2. (n) Very fast train in Italy

• Expresso – (n) What half the world says when they mean ‘espresso’

• Ex-press
  • (n) Former journalist
  • (n) Burnt-out clothes iron

• Express instructions – (n) Directions given so quickly that you forget everything after ‘You just ..’

• Express post – (n) A mythological faster-than-normal form of mail that people are willing to pay to believe in.

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

As Mr. Orr’s son, Welles, trudged slowly along to Hardly Fair, sitting on the bone-rattling seat of his cart pulled by a horse he’d borrowed (Clyde’s ‘Dale’), he speculated on what prices the goods he had on board would fetch.

He had no real head for trade and was easily confused when he had to calculate how many apples were in a pound of grapes and whether a wigwam for a goose’s bridle was considered essential for a man of good standing or a luxury that few could afford.

He knew that he could always rely on selling a few left-handed screwdrivers and some cans of striped paint and a couple of boxes of skyhooks to the dimmer folk but he always rode home thinking that what he really needed was something considered universally necessary by his largely impecunious customers eking out a living on the Aero Plains.

He grew barely enough to feed himself and his family of undiscovered artists, alchemists and potboiler authors (whose only real talent seemed to be procreation and who constantly complained that their genius was being stifled by the lack of an indoor toilet), so he had no agricultural surplus to sell.

As his spine almost cracked crossing the rock-strewn Crickety Creek, it dawned on him that the answer was right beneath his feet (or at least Dale’s feet), namely water, so the next week he rode to market with crates of bottled water labelled “Welles Water – Sourced from a pristine mountain stream and guaranteed free of cholera, typhoid, anthrax and all manner of other diseases present in Crickety Creek!”

On his way home in his newly-purchased flatbed truck, he collected the water barrels filled by his ne’er-do-well family from Crickety Creek and set out for his bottling plant.

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

When Alfie Centauri announced that he’d discovered where in the universe all the odd socks that disappeared in the weekly wash ended up, the responses from the public were culturally diverse (which of course was much to the satisfaction of ‘woke’ people) and tinged with a sense of reserve.

Hipsters said they never had that problem because they’d given up wearing them years ago to concentrate on growing beards and opening barista bars, where they could converse at length with customers about the quality of the crema and the impeccable FairTrade credentials of their beans.

App developers in Silicon Valley didn’t stop working on ways to embed cheap computer chips in socks so that they could always be tracked down, just like FindMyPhone, using a new technology called FoxMySox.

Obsessive-compulsive people smiled smugly, having for years pinned their pairs of socks together or bagged them before putting them in the wash and then hanging them out to dry in a similar manner.

Bachelors questioned whether it was even a problem because they simply bought the same brand and colour of socks exclusively, meaning they could never experience a mismatch and, over time, a lone sock would join another orphan to form a new pair.

Truth to tell, Alfie’s revelation that they all ended up in space and formed a growing Hose Zone Layer that would eventually provoke a new Ice Age largely went unremarked upon, except at NASA (the Nomadic and Absent Sock Agency), which promptly nominated him for the IgNobel Awards.