This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch’s weekly 99-word flash fiction challenge, with the prompt of ‘rethink the hero’.

A ballsy Amazon, with a prodigious cleavage and legs that go all the way up to her backside, storms into a cave and kicks the crap out of The Devil Personified and, supposedly, women everywhere cheer. The fact that her methodology replicates that of her foe is, supposedly, irrelevant to the sweetness of her revenge.

Meanwhile, a woman, with breasts streaked from breastfeeding and whose legs end at her knees, stands in her cavernous kitchen, surrounded by children abandoned by their father, and turns beef mince into basic burgers cheaper than McDonalds. She doesn’t have time to imagine heroism.

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

The former country pile had been the home of the descendants of the robber baron, the Earl of Mickelmouse, but had fallen into disrepair after the last of the line accidentally wandered into the front line during the Battle of the Somme while looking for the Officers Mess.

However, it had a brief but spectacular revival in the 1960’s when it was bought by R.G. Baji (nee John Smith), the lead singer of The Psychedelic Frogs, who’d had world-wide hits with ‘I lick your skin and I’m in heaven’ and ‘Maharishi, be mine tonight’, but who was now sick of touring and bought the derelict mansion, promptly re-naming it the Mickelmouse Club.

The Press fell over themselves with their increasingly salacious stories about the goings-on at the Club (describing the residents as Micklemouseketeers), including the importing of a herd of elephants, the construction of a fully heated greenhouse, drug-crazed orgies that went on for days and more nudity than the local twitchers could keep up with but they saved their greatest concocted outrage for when R.G. declared himself Lord Micklemouse and stood (unsuccessfully) for Parliament.

Despite it’s reputation in the media, the Mickelmouse Club became home to many a misfit escapee from suburban kitsch and the mainstream strictures of art and literature and, while it’s true that a certain amount of a horizontal folk dancing and imbibing of illegal substances did occur, it was a far more productive hub of creativity than many give it credit for in these Instagram times.

It was from here that Siouxsie Pocahontas (nee Sally Blodgett) developed her unique sense of clothing that later filled chain stores with her plastic Boadicea breastplates and miniskirts made from rat skins, not to mention that great writer, A. Man, and his masterpiece, ‘The Devil and the Tooth Fairy’.

Alas, the Mickelmouse Club is no more and, after reverting to his birth name, John Smith is now a Minister in the Tory Government (a peerage is rumoured to be impending) and he proceeds with the restoration of Mickelmouse, courtesy of a substantial grant from the National Trust.

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

Albert A. Stone did not want to be just another cog in the wheel of life, meshing with others to make some soulless machine rotate endlessly, although he could imagine deriving some perverse pleasure, for a short time at least, in being part of a reverse gear.

So he set himself the task of achieving what the laws of thermodynamics (and the entire scientific cheer squad for the immutability of such laws) said was impossible, namely creating a perpetual motion machine i.e. a machine once started that would function forever without any additional energy being supplied.

Sitting in front of his computer he read everything that Lord Google could tell him about perpetual motion, it’s supposed impossibility, all the experiments and theories that had failed and the ultimate indignity of the Patents Office refusing to even accept an application for any invention based on the purported existence of perpetual motion.

And then, as he checked the latest social media posts, he realised that the answer was staring back at him from the screen; the archetypal perpetual motion machine was the conspiracy theory that never died, like the cars that could run on water that had been spiked by Big Oil, the vaccines that the secret One World Government were using to control the world, the ‘evidence’ that 9/11 was stage managed by sinister sources within Government, the ‘Moon landing’ filmed in a Hollywood studio, and aliens living in seemingly human host bodies.

To prove his theory, he decided to construct his own perpetual motion machine experiment by inventing a Big Lie and monitoring its progress through popular culture and social media, to prove once and for all that perpetual motion not only existed but instances of it would never die.

After an exhaustive process, Albert hit on the idea that every electronic chip in computers, phones, TV sets, cars, credit cards, passports, domestic pet IDs etc is, in fact, a tiny two-way transmitter that matches the updatable chip secretly inserted into you in the maternity ward and which monitors your every thought and action, so that you can be automatically re-educated into thinking exactly what (insert whatever version of Big Brother is current at the time) wants you to think, and he launched his experiment with excitement and anticipation of vindication.

This piece of fluff was written for the D’Verse Poetics challenge to write a laundry poem.

When the permanent press get a whiff

and start to sniff

the stained seats of power,

they start to front-load the ‘news’

and then rinse and repeat

until their designated target gets the heat

of the hearsay tumble dryer

or gets pegged out to dry in the summer sun.

Then begins the target’s spin cycle

and the fluffing of the facts

to ensure the wrinkles are ironed out

and any stains are bleached

with the lye soap of fake news

until the target comes out lemon fresh

and looking whiter than white

and the cycle moves on

to the next 24 in the 7.

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge with the prompt of ‘escape’.

You could resign, storm out in high dudgeon and let the cards fall where they may. You could fantasise about finding another job where your skills are finally appreciated and imagine submitting your resignation with an air of smugness. You could become unmanageable and take the fired escape. (Except there’s the money, your unemployable middle age, the mortgage and the kids and your partner’s anger and the looming wasteland of your irrelevance to your former colleagues.) Or you could accept that you built this escape-proof prison and raise birds to release through the bars, before they become like you.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word ‘service.

Here at (insert name of corporation, business, government agency, etc) we value our service to our customers extremely highly and we do all that we can to ensure complete customer satisfaction in all our interactions.

From our highly professional call centre in (insert name of city here – Mumbai, Manila, Johannesburg etc) where our eager staff will read to you from their on-screen decision tree until they run out of options (or English) and then promise that their supervisor will call you shortly, through to our virtual assistant lurking in the bottom right hand corner of your screen that is amazingly accurate in being just as helpful as our human staff, you can be assured that we are here to help.

We are experiencing a high volume of calls and emails at this time due to (insert unforeseen circumstance e.g. Friday, Christmas, Chinese New Year etc), so wait times for your call or email to be answered may be longer than usual and we thank you for your patience and know that we know that you are always a valued customer.

We welcome your feedback, both positive and negative, and any complaints you have will be our top priority, so simply send them to our Complaints Supervisor at the email address that you’ll find on Page 17 of our FAQs. Note: We advise that we are experiencing a high volume of complaints at this time so wait times for your complaint to be addressed may be longer than usual. Or please feel free to drop into our Head Office at 666 Main Street, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

This piece was submitted to the D’Verse Prosery Possibilities page, with the condition that the following quote in full had to be included in a 144 word story. “I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.” Wisława Szymborska, “Possibilities”

“Just one last question, Mr. Khan. We’ve covered the unification of the Mongol tribes, developing the Silk Road, controlling huge areas of the world as your conquering armies dominated parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and, of course, Asia. We’ve covered your revolutionary military tactics, your complete trust in your generals, and your enlightened views on many aspects of society and religion. However it would seem that history may remember you most for your unmerciful slaughter of millions of innocent people and the annexation of their lands.  Tell me, is there a geographical line somewhere in your head where you will stand and be satisfied that you have achieved all of your dreams ?”

Genghis thought for several minutes about this and then said “The horizon, because I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.”

This piece is a response to the Six Sentence challenge for this week, with the prompt of ‘theory’.

Einstein may well have cracked the code for the way that physical phenomena interact in both special and general ways and led to a new understanding of gravity, despite doubters who discounted his theories on the basis that, in their view, gravity is not real; it’s just that the earth sucks.

Be that as it may, let me posit a Theory of Irrelativity, which suggests that members of families, whose entire interactivity is based on who begat whom in the generational recreational activity of horizontal folk dancing, create a complex web of social interactions and expectations that bear no resemblance to any rational form of connectivity.

Applying the principles of evidence-based science, I put it to you that multiplying the mass of shared DNA (M) with the coefficient of Connectivity (C), multiplied by itself as dictated by social mores, is not equal to the energy (E) applied to the maintenance of the social construct we call ‘families’ and their mythological-based equivalents, ‘friends’.

Indeed, in what other branch of science, especially those based on the Darwinian concept of evolution, would humans choose to congregate in such existentially destructive social events as Christmas, monogamous marriage, dinner parties and mutually incompatible football allegiances.

Hence my Theory of Irrelativity, grounded in the incontrovertible evidence that the likelihood of a person achieving happiness, let alone enlightenment, is inversely proportional to the time they spend with kin and social associates who live on fast food, are emotionally engaged with ‘reality’ TV shows, are active members of Q-anon and poison every interaction with their egocentricity.

Subscribers to my theory will, therefore, go forth and multiply with randomly selected partners from  outside their gene pool, excommunicate their birth families, and choose their friends from responsible compatibility sites, thus ensuring that Bob is never your Uncle (let alone a dinner guest).