Author: Doug Jacquier

‘Currying Disflavour’ is a winner

/ Doug Jacquier / 20 Comments

This story won the Longer Flash Fiction section (up to 500 words) of the Andrew Siderius Memorial Writing Contest, run by Friday Flash Fiction in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Judges’ comments included:

‘We especially enjoyed Doug’s descriptive language, such as “mustard-gassed appetite” and “the Hades of the wok.” It isn’t often that a reader laughs out loud when reading and visualizing a story. We found that “Currying Disflavour” was not just well-written but hilarious.’

Here’s the story (and for once this story is actually true).

Currying Disflavour

In my impending dotage (and you can stop that sniggering in the back row), I’ve discovered cooking and a penchant for adventure. I found a recipe for squid stir-fry and imagined a song of praise from my goodly spouse. ‘Perfectly cooked squid, on an eclectic bed of seasonal vegetables, conjuring the exotic flavours and aromas of Asia’ a pretentious restaurant menu would have said.

The recipe read ‘green curry paste’ but what would they know; one paste is as good as another, I thought, (ever the egalitarian). With what I imagined was a chefly flourish I enhanced my imagined masterpiece with a large blob of chilli paste, hurled straight into the Hades of the wok.

Instantly, I was alerted to the error of my ways by a nose like a running tap and a total shut-down of my lungs (except for the coughing bit). My wife rushed to my rescue, either concerned about my paroxysms or what I might be coughing into the evening meal, but, alas, she was swiftly felled by the same symptoms.

Every door and window open onto the evening chill, ceiling fans gyrating dangerously at speeds hitherto unknown and the Chernobyl wok banished to the nether regions of the back yard, we averted asphyxiation.

My previously baked sausage rolls sated what was left of our mustard-gassed appetite. They tasted a lot like humble pie.

The Theory of Irrelativity

/ Doug Jacquier / 28 Comments

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).

Blood lines

/ Doug Jacquier / 39 Comments

This piece was written for D’Verse’s challenge this week to demonstrate turns in poetry – where a poem shifts gear or opens a window.

At her birth

she staggered on unfamiliar legs

while her mother licked her clean

and tried not to stand on her in forgetfulness

or fatigue.

Soon she stood alone,

with a coat that waxed in spring

and waned in winter moon.

At the yearling sale she pranced,

nostrils flared,

unminded of her fetlocks

in the racing years.

In time, she ran her maiden,

romance in full stride when,

shifting in the running,

her stablemate grabbed the inside rail.

She took off in pursuit.

(Nothing cuts like an odds-fed whip

a furlong out from home.)

And then, snap!

“History”, her verdict went

and the vets screened the final shot.

Her blood soaked into the track

and into the knacker’s van

and she was gone.

The mother of deserved sorrows

/ Doug Jacquier / 21 Comments

This is my response to the D’Verse poetry challenge around paradox.

I am the mother of deserved sorrows

I am the ender of the grief.

I am violator of the rapists

I am the robber of the thief.

I am killer of the killers,

I am the harbinger of fate.

I am the slayer of the ‘innocent’

that breached the children’s gate.

I am the puncher of the punchers

that break a woman’s face.

I am the Lord High re-positioner

that puts them in their place.

I am the fleecer of the businesses

that live by telling lies.

I leave their empty bank accounts

to the mercy of the flies.

I am the new messiah

that brings preachers to their knees

and opens up their honeypots

to the faithful’s bees.

I am the paradox of virtue

wrapped in the cloak of vice.

The warm blood of the evil

no match for veins of ice.

Snarky snickersnackery

/ Doug Jacquier / 12 Comments

This preposterous piece of poetic puerility was written for the divine Ms. Owen’s ‘A Mused Poetry’ prompt for this week: ‘Snarky Rant. That’s right: a jaded, sarcastic, fed up, perhaps even nihilistic poem in an “I stick it to you, sucky events!” manner.‘ I’ll thank Charles Dodgson for the inspiration when next I see him.

The time has come, so all us said,

to not talk of many things:

of twits and tweets to ‘mind your beeswax’

of savages and would-be kings

of whether votes are fixed or not

and whether pigs have wings.

Be gone, your wretched plague talk

of drinking Kool-Aid with your bleach

of bingeing booze and Netflix

of not going to the beach

of ‘who is that masked stranger?’

No more, I do beseech!

Let’s rid ourselves of poverty

Of coherent speech and word

Spike the ‘like’ and ‘whatever’

Treat WTF as if a steaming t**d

Let’s have a pedant as a President,

a VP proud to be a nerd.

Fie upon the boomer bashers

Flinging our legacy askew

Blaming us for every ill

From planet to housing queue

End their blameless sanctimony;

Vegans, anyone, on the barbecue?

Life fluttering by.

/ Doug Jacquier / 24 Comments

Written for the Jan 7 99-word Flash Fiction challenge with the prompt words of ‘butterfly’ and ‘stone’.

When you were small, you used to call butterflies ‘flutterbys’ and you’d chase them through my veg patch and I’d pretend to be angry but you’d just laugh and keep running. When you got older, you’d stone the crows in my corn patch because you were going through your ‘everything has to be yellow’ phase and you made me plant a hundred sunflowers and buy a golden retriever. When you visited with your daughter and she chased the flutterbys through the veg patch, the wind blew dust in my eyes and I had to rub them for a while.

Paradise on Earth

/ Doug Jacquier / 27 Comments

This piece was written for the 6 sentence story challenge with the prompt word of ‘Distance’

For Gerald, the plague represented a blessing from on high, rather than a sign of God’s punishment of a sinful, unrepentant world, as posited by some parishioners at his local church (at least the ones who weren’t positing that it was a hoax). He was in a state of bliss at not having to travel with crowds of BO-venting people on the bus and train to the office where he worked and not having to listen to his colleagues inane prattle about football, TV, children and social media. Annoyingly, he did have to acquire a laptop so he could ‘attend’ the odd virtual meeting but he counted that as a minor expense in the grand scheme of things that comprised the nirvana of isolation. Home-delivered groceries did away with the living hell of negotiating supermarkets, which in turn led him to the ever-expanding universe of on-line shopping and (ahem) certain other activities. As a nominal Christian, he felt a little guilty that he occasionally prayed for the plague to last forever, now that he had found Paradise on Earth, but he knew that some bright spark would ruin everything eventually by coming up with a vaccine. In the meantime, he reveled in what others reviled, namely, keeping his distance.

Remember not and remember

/ Doug Jacquier / 3 Comments

I have just re-discovered this piece I wrote for my wife, Sue, when her beloved younger brother was facing his final days with us.

Remember not

his lostness in space,

his days, numbered and unnumbered, annihilated through ingestion,

his false stairways climbed in hope of heaven

his roads travelled to others’ horizons;

he knew the sun would always rise.

Remember

his dreams, real or otherwise,

his boyness, in beard-wreathed disguise,

his soul, forever in for repair,

his joke of a world, now slapstick and now ironic;

all is there for you as long as you draw breath

and you remember.