Author: Doug Jacquier

My car’s in pole position

/ Doug Jacquier / 10 Comments

This my response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers challenge to write 100 words about this pic provided by J. Hardy Carroll.

  • Did you lock the car?
  • Of course I did.
  • How can you be so sure.
  • Do you see the ‘Open’ sign lit up?
  •  No
  • So that means it’s locked.
  • Did you have to park up there? I nearly fell getting down!
  • Quit nagging. The rope ladder worked fine. Besides we’re never gonna get hemmed in by other dumb parkers like we did last time.
  • Maybe we could have just parked another block away.
  • No way. It’s my God-given right to park no more than 10 steps from the mall.

Disaster limericks

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

These flawed gems are in response to this week’s Terrible Poetry challenge, which consists of ‘stockpiling against a worldwide disaster, in limerick form’.

Wine not

The world is facing disaster

So stock up on tuna and pasta

Cache rolls for the loo

Store sanitising goo

And ensure your wine cellar’s vaster.

 

Paperless society

Go on, kiss everyone in sight

Before we all fall down to the blight

Forget all that tucker

And give us a pucker

But clench your other end real tight.

 

One flu over the cuckoo’s nest

There’s a man in DC called The Pres

He t-wee-ts, he pooh-poohs, and he says

It’s all something minor

Like everything from China

A few less old folk, who cares?

Tap dancing

/ Doug Jacquier / 7 Comments

This my response to the 99 word Flash Fiction Challenge prompt of ‘tapping’.

He started with a shuffle on the kitchen table, skillfully avoiding the remnant spaghetti bolognaise, wine glasses and tootsie rolls. (Some time ago, ‘she’ became ‘he’ with a ball change when she was living in Buffalo.) Confident of his Shirley Temple rhythm now, he performed a twirling arabesque to the draining board, hoping for a riffle effect but the leftover goose fat cooked his plans. Less than deftly, he shim-shammed across the Hot and Cold, where, alas, he lost his footing and lay sprawled in the sink with a broken ankle, one of the many drawbacks of tap dancing.

Swiping our money

/ Doug Jacquier / 20 Comments

This week’s photo prompt (below) from Friday Fictioneers

 

‘Blatant revenue raising!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who mostly uses this park?’

‘Well, mostly us older folk, I guess.’

‘Exactly!’

‘And who else?’

‘Well, there’s mothers with young children …’

‘… who never want to go before they go but need to go the minute they get there.’

‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

‘Have you ever walked past that thing without getting a call of nature?’

‘Well, now that you mention it ..’

‘And what’s behind those trees?’

‘A public convenience.’

‘… which costs a dollar, using your swipe card.’

‘So you’ve got to swipe to wipe?’

‘Always with the jokes.’

 

Photo Credit: ceayr

Fountain

Ern Malley Incarnate (Vegan Options Available)

/ Doug Jacquier / Leave a comment

‘Now is the winter of our wet cement’

quoth Lucy in her sty with diamonds in her silk-purse ears.

Meanwhile, in a battlefield far, far, away, Dicky Three hunched his back,

despairing at the sward strewn with sordid, sworded bodies in his path

and cried ‘A hearse, a hearse, my kingdom for a hearse’.

Hearing nothing but the sounds of silence he bellowed

‘Unleash the dogs of war. Out, damn-ed Spot and yes, you, Fido,

and you, frumious Bandersnatch.

And let no-one ask who let the dogs out.’

But alas, alack, the dud plan of attack now needed a patsy stone.

He roared so all could hear,

“Cry ‘Harry (and Meghan), England and Boy George’ ”

and hied himself to the tintantabulation of the belfry of Notre Dame.

Thus it was left to the immoral bard, TS (George) Eliot to record,

on a cold, bright day whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

and the clock was striking thirteen,

“This is the way the world ends,

not with a banger but a Wimpy burger.”

From bottom-burps to bogeys

/ Doug Jacquier / 4 Comments

This was written for the weekly Terrible Poetry challenge. The divine Ms. Chelsea says ‘the topic is the cute (or ‘cute’) things that kids say. I’ll admit I’m more inspired by the parenthetical version after our dinner conversations lately. What is it with young children (perhaps just with boys) and potty humor? Do they really think meals are the best place to discuss vomit?’

From bottom-burps to bogeys

 

The dinner table farce started

when the oldest one farted,

and the middle-un began piddlin’

and then the underling was chundering.

To No. 1, Mum said ‘Stop that at once!, young Beau’

And he said ‘Sure, Ma, which way did it go?’

To No. 2, ‘The table’s not the place for peeing you know’

He replied ‘But you always tell us to go with the flow’.

No. 3 didn’t speak but passed his plate full of sick

To the dog under the table, from whence came the sound of ‘lick, lick’.

Dad smiled at his wife and ‘Don’t be such an old fogey’,

as he extracted and ate a big bogey.

 

Translations for non-Australians:

Chundering = vomiting

Bogey = booger

Clarice of the light

/ Doug Jacquier / 3 Comments

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction 99 word challenge, with the prompt word of ‘Clarice’. I have taken my inspiration from the Australian painter, Clarice Beckett. You can learn more about her here.

‘Oh, that Clarice. Fancies painting more than men. Imagine that? Still, she’s done the right thing by her parents. Even if she doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.’

Robbed of her days by bedpans and sponge baths and soiled sheets, she inhabited the fringes of light, the beginnings and endings.

At the end, all of that light was in the shed, rotted and torn by the deniers of her eyes.

Yet the sun rose from her grave and illuminated her beaches and her streets anew. And now the monied hang the consequences.

An image of Evening, St Kilda Road by Clarice Beckett

Right-wing extremist

/ Doug Jacquier / 19 Comments

This 100 word piece was written for the Friday Fictioneers  photo prompt below.

 

‘What’s with your new display. It’s a little one-sided, isn’t it?’

‘It’s symbolic of my political views.’

‘How so?’

‘Do you see any red there left of centre?’

‘Now that you mention it ….’

‘No tomatoes, no pinko apples, no anti-capitalist red capsicums, no radical radishes. And don’t get me started on those sob-story red onions. I’m not going to provide any oxygen to any fruit or vegetable that’s left of centre.’

‘But aren’t you cutting of half your income to make your point? And surely you can’t assign a political leaning to a vegetable?’

‘Have you voted lately?’

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

Ern Malley Incarnate (Vegan Options Available)

/ Doug Jacquier / 13 Comments

This piece was written for the Terrible Poetry challenge centred on the Bard of Australia, Ern Malley . Can’t think who could have alerted the charming Ms Chelsea Owens to Ern’s stellar career.

 

‘Now is the winter of our wet cement’

quoth Lucy in her sty with diamonds in her silk-purse ears.

Meanwhile, in a battlefield far, far, away, Dicky Three hunched his back,

despairing at the sward strewn with sordid, sworded bodies in his path

and cried ‘A hearse, a hearse, my kingdom for a hearse’.

Hearing nothing but the sounds of silence he bellowed

‘Unleash the dogs of war. Out, damn-ed Spot and yes, you, Fido,

and you, frumious Bandersnatch.

And let no-one ask who let the dogs out.’

But alas, alack, the dud plan of attack now needed a patsy stone.

He roared so all could hear,

“Cry ‘Harry (and Meghan), England and Boy George’ ”

and hied himself to the tintantabulation of the belfry of Notre Dame.

Thus it was left to the immoral bard, TS (George) Eliot to record,

on a cold, bright day whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

and the clock was striking thirteen,

“This is the way the world ends,

not with a banger but a Wimpy burger.”

Candles snuffed out

/ Doug Jacquier / 18 Comments

This 100 word piece was written for Friday Fictioneers with this photo as the prompt.

 

The opening of ‘Mme. Tussaud’s – The Musical’ was billed as a turning point in the history of the musical theatre but the cognoscenti, noticeable by their absence from the private boxes, begged to differ and the critics were merciless.

“Stiff and failing to wax lyrical.’ London Times

“Impressive costuming but lacked vivacity.” Washington Post

Producer M. Night Shyamalan vigorously defended his work, explaining it was an experimental work that attempted to explore the seventh sense but agreed the sagging expressions caused by the heat of the lights did not assist in conveying the complex emotions he envisaged for his characters.