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

Browsing on Ebay, I stumbled upon a book entitled ‘A Guide to Hell – The Alternative Facts’ by B. L. Zebub, with a description that read ‘Learn what the corrupt elites don’t want you to know about an alternative AfterLife’ and offered for sale by the highly rated Seller, Q. Anon.

My winning bid brought this tome (smelling somewhat of sulfur) to my home and I immediately began to explore ‘Chapter 1 – It is NOT hot in Hell’, which informed me that, contrary to all the lies, Hell’s residents enjoy the very pleasant warmth of those lazy Hades days of summer.

Chapter 2 made it clear that the soundscape does NOT consist of wailing and lamentations but instead the joyful sounds emanating from residents enjoying the mud baths and the hot tubs.

As the chapters unfolded, I learned that the Lake of Fire is actually a very pleasant place to go sailing and that the so-called ‘brimstone’ is actually the charcoal used on the myriad barbecues where the residents enjoy gnashing their teeth on a cornucopia of culinary delights provided by Mr. T. Rump, St. Alin and Miaow C. Tong.

In the final chapter, The Real Revelations, I learned the secret codes used for programs to imprison the citizenry (e.g. Covid = Centralised Oligarchy via Vaccinations, Internet and Disinformation).

When I’d finished reading, I congratulated myself on my investment; after all, signing over my brain was small price to pay for The Truth and, besides, I wasn’t using it anyway.

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.

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