These two pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘keepsake’, one for serious and one for fun.

Alice’s mother and the red brooch

Her mother was sorting through her personal possessions when Alice noticed a cheap costume jewellery red brooch, which she thought was seriously at odds with her mother’s usual good taste, so she said, ‘Sentimental value?’

With a slight tilt of her head and a movement at the corner of her mouth her mother said ‘At the end of the War, many men returned changed in ways we could never have imagined were possible and some sat in silence, some just sat and cried, some couldn’t hold down a job, some became drunks, some became gamblers and some became wife-beaters. A small number of women started wearing the same tacky red brooch you see here and it meant she was living with a ‘case’, a case of a man who could not be put back together again and who was inflicting misery that was no longer tolerable, but society seemed unwilling to stop him.’

Alice blinked involuntarily and rapidly and she said ‘So what happened to these ‘cases’?’ and her mother replied that someone in the network with no connections to the case would ‘remove’ him.

Knowing immediately what ‘removed’ meant, Alice asked if the network still existed and her mother said  ‘Haven’t a clue really but I thought I’d put it in your pile as a keepsake, in case it might be useful in the future.’

Stunned, the only thing Alice could think of was to change the subject so she shifted to her father, who had died not long after she was born and asked her mother whether there were any of his things that she’d kept and she said ‘Oh, no, dear, I got rid of those a long time ago because, although I truly loved him when I married him, he was never the same after the War.’

Not the sharpest tool in the shed

The retired Irish dentist, Phil McCavity*, was having some craic over a Guinness with his old friend, the cast iron chair maker, Paddy O’Furniture, when Paddy said ‘Now what’s that dooverlacky you’ve got in your garden there, Phil?’

‘Well, I tell you, Paddy, that’s a multi-headed, reciprocating-engine-powered, mobile water-saving sprinkler that I bought from Pete Moss down at the garden centre, so that I don’t have to keep dragging hoses around when it’s summer next Wednesday.’

‘I think you’re soft in the head, Phil, especially after that automatic lawnmower he sold you last year chopped off half your toes when you dozed off after too many Jamiesons.’

‘Now, that wasn’t Pete’s fault so much as user error, because I didn’t read the very specific instructions that came in the box, although I must say it would have helped if they hadn’t been translated from Korean by that eedjit, Matt Finnish, down at the printers.’

‘Enough of that’, said Paddy, ‘I’m off to Dublin for my holidays next week and seeing as how I’ve never been there before, I wondered if you might help me out with directions and I’ll bring you back a keepsake for your trouble.’

‘Of course’ said Phil ‘that’s easy because you just take the road to the next village, turn right and then after the third intersection, turn left and go for three miles and … no, that’s too complicated, take a left at the village and drive six miles to the first roundabout and take the third exit where you see the sign to … oh, to be honest, Paddy, if I was going to Dublin I wouldn’t start from here.’

*’Borrowed’ from the late great comic genius, Spike Milligan.

This piece was written for the weekly Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word of ‘treatment’.

Rufus Hornblower, the ‘it’s only the flu’, ‘it’s your sovereign right not to wear a mask’, ‘vaccination’s a plot’ shock jock, was bewildered when he woke up on a hospital trolley in a warehouse, after he’d gone to ER about his severe breathing difficulties.

A doctor wearing full PPE was observing him closely and taking copious notes before noticing Rufus was awake.

‘Ah, Mr. Hornblower, you’re back with us; are you feeling better?

‘No, I’m getting worse by the minute, maybe even dying from that plague thing, so why aren’t you giving me any treatment?’

‘Oh, Mr. Hornblower, you can’t die from an imaginary disease, so we’re moving you to the big circus tent we’ve set up on the waste ground behind the hospital, or as we call it, the Centre for Observing Victims of Imaginary Diseases, or COVID for short. You’ll enjoy your time there, what with the clown school, the acrobats teaching backflips, tightrope walking lessons and, of course, lyin’ taming.’

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

Oscar (Monte) Video’s extended interview with The Abominable Snowman, establishing once and for all that not only did he exist but that he was not alone and part of a thriving community, should have been the media sensation of the century.

He would excitedly show his detailed notes to news editors only to be told over and over again that they couldn’t run it without pictures and certainly not without audio.

Oscar would explain that he’d lost all his recording equipment, along with his cinematographer Alice ‘Eileen’ Down, in the landslide that she triggered by a sneezing fit, but to no avail.

One sympathetic newsman said to him ‘Look, you have to understand that over 40% of adults are illiterate; they can’t follow a story without pictures or audio. Here’s what I suggest you do; hire an actor, get him to learn the interview script, film him and you anywhere there’s snow, get Morgan Freeman to do the voice-over, and we’ll run it.’

A gazillion YouTube views later, Oscar was drowning in another avalanche, one driven by howls of ‘Photoshop, Photoshop’ but in his mind the truth was out there and now he was in search of Big Foot, with the backing of a crew provided by Steven Spielberg for his new movie, Y-ET-I.

Footnote: There is a supposed audio interview with the Abominable Snowman, recorded by Stan Freberg in 1957, but this has since been discredited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgKVN7v74

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

Note: Examples only – (may contain traces of nuts)

Little Red Riding Hood – includes wild animal devouring old lady and an axe murder.

Julius Caesar –main character stabbed repeatedly in the rotunda.

Romeo and Juliet – includes under-age sex and portrayal of suicide.

The Bible – a lot of smiting and begatting, as well as fratricide and brief scenes of nudity.

Father Christmas – involves scenes of sweat shops and enslaved reindeer.

Snow White – portrays little people as exploiters of young woman in trouble, as well as stepmother-shaming.

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

List of I-lands of the World (including those that are phonetically similar) – Extract from Wackypedia

I Land – Home to the Narcissus people. Principal economy: Social media and mirrors. National anthem: ‘Mi, mi, mi, look at me’.

Ire Land – Home to angry people from many nations. Principal economy: Guinness and craic. National anthem: You’ll never fight alone.

I and I Land – Home to the Rastafarians. Principal economy: Music and ‘erbs. National anthem: Whatever, as long as it has a reggae beat.

Eye for an eye Land – Home to the Revenger people. Principal economy – Missiles and eye-patches. National anthem: This land is eye-for-an-eye land.

‘Igh Lands – Home to Cockney immigrants to Scotland. Principal economy: Jellied eels and deep-fried Mars Bars. National anthem: The Bow Bells of Scotland.

Aye-Aye Land – Home to permanently agreeable people from all lands. Principal economy: Doves and door mats. National anthem: The meek shall inherit the earth. (Not to be confused with the Principality of Ai-Ai, home of chimpanzees, sloths and the artificially intelligent.)

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

Galatians 6:7 (modernised for gender equity)  ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a woman soweth, that shall she also reap.’

Harper, with her companion in tow, knocked confidently on the door that displayed a brass name plate engraved with the name ‘Mr. B. L. Zebub, Esq., Life Coach and Death Doula.’

A smooth-shaven, elegantly dressed man with an ingratiating smile and eyes that drilled into your very core greeted her ceremoniously and said softly ‘I sense you have made your decision and that we have a deal.’

Harper replied firmly ‘I have and I would like to proceed with you ensuring that my novel is published and feted throughout my lifetime and remains a staple of the canon long after I am dead.’

The man made a pretense of not having already known that and handed her a contract that assigned Harper’s soul to him for eternity, and which he insisted was to be signed with her own blood, and, nodding towards her companion, said ‘I see you have brought your own witness.’

‘Yes’ she replied ‘this is Truman, who appears under another name in my novel, and who may well be a future customer of yours; he likes writing in cold blood.’

Harper then signed with a vigorous flourish, killing the querulous mocking bird of doubt in one fell swoop, and reveled in thoughts of the wages of her sin.

This piece was written for the Blog Battle Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘precious’.

Karen trawled the internet constantly, often feverishly, in search of evidence that the world was conspiring to bruise her soul at every turn. She was rarely disappointed and lived in a constant state of distress, a state she lamented to her ever-diminishing circle of online ‘friends’, her real-life friends and family having long since departed the scene. She saw this as proof-positive that the world was a cruel and oppressive place for one burdened with her natural God-given delicacy.

She had little time for others with the same affliction and affectations and would happily join in the chorus of ‘suck it up, snowflake’ abuse that their posts engendered. She saw herself as the embodiment of ‘the last guy’, made famous by Arlo Guthrie’s request of us to ‘think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody’s got it worse than that guy. Nobody in the whole world.’ Except that Karen was a woman, which made being last even more intolerable and tragic.

Over time, she began to realise that her scattergun approach to attracting sympathy was simply not gaining her enough attention. She needed to find a way to harness an army of put-upon kindred souls that would one day crown her as the Queen of Outrageous Misfortune.

Slowly she crafted a conspiracy theory that centred on a Government plot to de-sensitise the citizenry to the daily assaults on their delicate and precious sense of self. She called it the Toughen Up Plot (or TUP) and her acolytes became TuPpers, who brought forward endless stories of callousness that led to the scars known as ‘TUPper wear’.

The first to join in were the left-handed Catholics, closely followed by the victims of ‘blue and green should never be seen’ tyranny. In quick succession, they were joined by people not covered by LGBQTI+ categories such that they questioned whether in fact they existed as sentient non-binary beings, vegans traumatised by ads for butcher shops, lottery losers not offered grief counselling and comfort dogs, University students in therapy because their lecturer mentioned a writer who was not ‘woke’ and mothers who breast-fed in public who felt blanked because no-one told them they were offended, and the list kept growing.

Within hours, Karen had won the Internet. And then, suddenly, within minutes she had lost it. She had succumbed to Andy Warhol Erasure Syndrome – Optimum Media Extent (aka AWESOME). She had made the fatal mistake of becoming famous for 15 minutes and her time was up.

But, just as she thought all was lost, along came Covid and she was back in the fray, asserting her sovereign right to be an unvaccinated super-spreader and screaming her One World Government conspiracy slogans into the cameras for the Six O’Clock News.

Finally she understood her precious gift for eternal preciousness. And she lived happily ever after.