Flash Fiction

Where have all the odd ones gone?

/ Doug Jacquier / 33 Comments

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.

Solitude has it’s own rewards

/ Doug Jacquier / 4 Comments

Keith turned his gas bottle on, lit the flame on his camp stove, poured a slurp of peanut oil into his wok and, after feeding a couple of pieces to Arfer his German Shepherd, added the diced meat he’d had marinating overnight. When it had browned, he added the sliced vegetables and gave the wok a shake. He had just poured himself a glass of cabernet sauvignon when a white 4WD towing a white caravan pulled up some fifty metres away.

A man in his sixties with a belly ponderously overhanging his shorts emerged, puffing noisily, and shouted to Keith ‘Great spot you have here’. He was followed shortly after by a woman of a similar age with badly dyed blond hair, a blouse displaying a shoe-leather tanned cleavage and a skirt short enough to have been fashionable fifty years ago. Through her nose she intoned gaily ‘You look like you could do with some company.’

Keith looked at them coldly and said ‘Why did you stop here?’ They both looked perplexed and she said ‘Well, you never know who’s out on the road and there’s safety in numbers.’

Keith said ‘There’s no numbers here except for me and Arfer. How do you know I’m not an axe murderer and that Arfer doesn’t live off the leftovers?’

The man said ‘Come on mate, you’re scaring the missus. There’s no need for that sort of talk.’

Keith said ‘Here’s what I suggest you do. Get back in your snow-white rig and keep driving until you see a group of similar group of grey nomads circled around a camp fire. Pull in there and get out your cask red and cheese and biscuits and join them. Your wife can share her three gazillion photos of her grandchildren with the other women who will tell her they’re gorgeous and you can share your ill-informed prejudices on politics, the unemployed, superannuation and football with a sympathetic group of morons. Or, to paraphrase, fuck off.’

To underline Keith’s sentiments, Arfer stood up, bared his teeth and growled menacingly. The couple moved rapidly to their vehicle. Once safely ensconced, the man yelled ‘You’re mad, ya bastard’ and pulled back onto the road.

Resigned to the fact that his stir-fry was now largely ruined, Keith picked at it in a desultory fashion before giving most of it to Arfer.

Keith picked up his well-worn leather-bound journal, pumped up his lamp and said ‘Arfer, what do you think of this passage? I think it has a sort of timelessness but that may be beyond your sense of the aesthetic.’

Keith read the passage in his sonorous voice. When he’d finished, Arfer revealed nothing.

Keith said ‘You’re right, it needs work. Time for bed.’

He turned off the lamp, burrowed into his swag and, as he drifted off to sleep, he noticed the moonlight glinting off his axe and heard Arfer laughing in his sleep.

Who needs armour?

/ Doug Jacquier / 33 Comments

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

I’m an Australian on a brief visit to the city the locals insist is pronounced Tronno and my hosts have pre-warned me to buy some protective clothing as armour against the snow conditions, as well as earmuffs and heavy boots, but I economise with a heavy coat, a thick scarf and a beanie.

That evening they pick me up in a car and take me to a nearby restaurant that serves fabulous Thai food but weariness makes me want to call time early but I insist on my hosts staying to enjoy themselves.

After all, it’s only 3 blocks to my hotel.

By now it is minus 25 and the wind is howling.

After block 1, I can no longer feels my hands inside my inadequate gloves and after block 2, I feel like if I touch my ears or my beard they will break off and by half-way along block 3, I fear I won’t make it because my street-shoe-clad feet have turned to solid ice.

Cursing my miserliness, somehow I make it into the hotel and slump in an armchair, waiting for something approximating feeling to return to my feet so I can make it across the lobby to the lifts.

The Oodnagalahbi Fillum Festival

/ Doug Jacquier / 12 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge, with the prompt of ‘film festival’.

Gazza had always pronounced ‘film’ as fillum, so it came as no surprise when he organised the Oodnagalahbi Fillum Festival and its associated event, the Fillem Food Fantasia. The Fillum Festival featured the world premieres of two blockbusters, ‘Mad Max and his beaut ute’ and ‘Killer Roos’. People and animals came from miles around, including more red kelpies than you could yell ‘get up’ to.  After the fillums finished, it was time to hoe into the Food Fantasia, including sweet and sour popcorn, peanut butter choc top ice-creams, and salted yabbie and vinegar chips. Pity the beer ran out.

Glossary:

Ute – A vehicle based on the same platform as a family car but with a unibody  construction and a built-in open tray area for carrying goods; similar but not identical to a pick-up truck. 

Roo – Abbreviation of kangaroo

Kelpie – a breed of energetic working dogs developed in Australia from British sheepdogs. The Working Sheep Dogs of Australia Kelpies – YouTube

Yabbie – freshwater crayfish of the genus Cherax of Australia, commonly raised for food.

Restore factory settings

/ Doug Jacquier / 21 Comments

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

James wanted to return to the more innocent self of his childhood, when all things seemed possible and he had plenty of time to explore possibilities, without knowingly hurting anyone or anything.

He believed he was essentially a good man but he regretted the bad things he had done in his life, especially the things he had done in Iraq.

At night, he was haunted by the memories of those bad things, felt deep shame for having done them and he would have done anything to have his time again.

But he knew this couldn’t happen and he didn’t believe in any AA-type salvation through making amends with God and the people that he had wronged.

He couldn’t go back to Iraq anyway and, even if he could, an apology wasn’t going to bring back the dead.

As he stared ruefully at his phone, he realised that what he desperately wanted was to be able to press a button in his brain and ‘Restore Factory Settings.’

Ess-sense

/ Doug Jacquier / 3 Comments

This piece was written as a response to The Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge, with the prompt of “not everyone fits a prom dress”, from Ellis Delaney’s song ‘Not everyone fits a prom dress‘.

Not everyone fits a prom dress
Not everyone fits a compress
Not everyone spurns a temptress
Not everyone earns their distress
Not everyone wears a nightdress
Not everyone cares to undress
Not everyone has a headdress
Not everyone has the right address
Not everyone has their wounds dress’d
Not everyone is super-stressed
Not everyone gets some redress
Not everyone feels they’re repressed
Not everyone is a seamstress
Not everyone is a mistress
Not everyone is a waitress
Not everyone is a priestess
Not everyone is a tigress
Not everyone has to digress
But everyone needs a hand to press.

Ess-sense

/ Doug Jacquier / 11 Comments

This piece was written as a response to The Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge, with the prompt of “not everyone fits a prom dress”, from Ellis Delaney’s song ‘Not everyone fits a prom dress‘.

Not everyone fits a prom dress
Not everyone fits a compress
Not everyone spurns a temptress
Not everyone earns their distress
Not everyone wears a nightdress
Not everyone cares to undress
Not everyone has a headdress
Not everyone has the right address
Not everyone has their wounds dress’d
Not everyone is super-stressed
Not everyone gets some redress
Not everyone feels they’re repressed
Not everyone is a seamstress
Not everyone is a mistress
Not everyone is a waitress
Not everyone is a priestess
Not everyone is a tigress
Not everyone has to digress
But everyone needs a hand to press.

It all adds up

/ Doug Jacquier / 36 Comments

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

The pedagogic method that Professor of Mathematics at H. R. Umph University, Archer Roman, used to awaken young minds and explore the hitherto unplumbed depths of their intelligence was to occasionally posit a trick question (hence his nickname of Fibbin’ Archie) and see how long it took them to cotton on.

The conundrum for his students was that he would do this randomly in amongst an otherwise world-class grounding in applied mathematics, which had become an almost obligatory pre-requisite to join the upper echelons of key scientific fields, such as computing, environmental science and the military (e.g. developing methods to kill people more efficiently).

On this particular day, Professor Roman (sporting his usual eccentric attire of trilby hat, kilt and Doc Marten boots) posited this problem to his rapt but anxious students: ‘What mathematical formula can be used to measure the likelihood of a politician lying at any given moment? Use all that I have taught you to reach your answer and provide proofs as to how you achieved it, by tomorrow.’

The wailing that evening from the student accommodation, fed by a constant stream of pizza and Red Bull, was akin to that said to emanate from the lower depths of Hell and one poor soul had to be restrained from hurling himself through a third-floor window.

The following morning a sorry parade of bedraggled and red-eyed students shuffled into his class, with the single exception of Teresa Green, a scholarship student (courtesy of the benevolence of the Max Factor Foundation) who clearly had experienced a refreshing sleep and was as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a vixen.

Professor Roman fixed on Teresa and said, ’You appear to have either given up or solved the problem’, to which she replied, ‘When x equals the degree to which the subject’s lips are moving, any value of x above zero is proof positive of the presence of mendacity’, and the width of the professor’ smile far exceeded the length of the other students’ faces.

Note: Sorry, but I couldn’t resist a pun on the name of one of the great mathematicians of all time, Fibonacci, from which Fibonacci numbers are derived. Fibonacci sequences appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichokes, the uncurling of a fern, the arrangement of a pine cone, as well as the family tree of honeybees. They also do something very clever when it comes to tracing your genealogy back to where you started but I got lost somewhere in the seventh begat.

Blood brothers

/ Doug Jacquier / 28 Comments

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

The longer the years stretched out, the sooner that Garth expected to receive the call that it was his turn to remove some heinous citizen that had escaped the clutches of the law and thus thought themselves not only free but invincible against any attempt to exact justice upon them.

Nonetheless, when the call came, it not only surprised him but terrified him that he might fail the Brotherhood that he had called upon in his own hour of need, after his son was left brain damaged from an unprovoked beating by a steroid-enhanced nightclub bouncer, who had walked free on a technicality.

Whatever the target had done, it was not for Garth to question his assignment; the Brotherhood had assessed the case and unanimously agreed that the deed needed to be done, although they left the timing and the methodology to the assigned terminator.

This particular criminal against humanity was a surgeon with a reputation for turning up in the operating theatre drunk and recently a woman had died on the operating table during a routine operation that he’d botched, only to see the profession close ranks and exonerate him and, most gallingly, have the Queen touch her sword to his shoulder and tell him to ‘Arise, Sir Gregory’.

Garth studied his quarry for several days to establish his pattern of movements, his family and friendship networks and the times and locations when he was most likely to be alone and settled on one of the doctor’s clandestine late-night visits to a high-class call girl.

The deed done, fittingly with a scalpel, Garth fancied a pint or three at his local pub and, when he entered, one of his cronies noted that he hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks and he replied calmly ‘I’ve been on Knight shift.’