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

Note: Examples only – (may contain traces of nuts)

Little Red Riding Hood – includes wild animal devouring old lady and an axe murder.

Julius Caesar –main character stabbed repeatedly in the rotunda.

Romeo and Juliet – includes under-age sex and portrayal of suicide.

The Bible – a lot of smiting and begatting, as well as fratricide and brief scenes of nudity.

Father Christmas – involves scenes of sweat shops and enslaved reindeer.

Snow White – portrays little people as exploiters of young woman in trouble, as well as stepmother-shaming.

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

List of I-lands of the World (including those that are phonetically similar) – Extract from Wackypedia

I Land – Home to the Narcissus people. Principal economy: Social media and mirrors. National anthem: ‘Mi, mi, mi, look at me’.

Ire Land – Home to angry people from many nations. Principal economy: Guinness and craic. National anthem: You’ll never fight alone.

I and I Land – Home to the Rastafarians. Principal economy: Music and ‘erbs. National anthem: Whatever, as long as it has a reggae beat.

Eye for an eye Land – Home to the Revenger people. Principal economy – Missiles and eye-patches. National anthem: This land is eye-for-an-eye land.

‘Igh Lands – Home to Cockney immigrants to Scotland. Principal economy: Jellied eels and deep-fried Mars Bars. National anthem: The Bow Bells of Scotland.

Aye-Aye Land – Home to permanently agreeable people from all lands. Principal economy: Doves and door mats. National anthem: The meek shall inherit the earth. (Not to be confused with the Principality of Ai-Ai, home of chimpanzees, sloths and the artificially intelligent.)

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

Galatians 6:7 (modernised for gender equity)  ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a woman soweth, that shall she also reap.’

Harper, with her companion in tow, knocked confidently on the door that displayed a brass name plate engraved with the name ‘Mr. B. L. Zebub, Esq., Life Coach and Death Doula.’

A smooth-shaven, elegantly dressed man with an ingratiating smile and eyes that drilled into your very core greeted her ceremoniously and said softly ‘I sense you have made your decision and that we have a deal.’

Harper replied firmly ‘I have and I would like to proceed with you ensuring that my novel is published and feted throughout my lifetime and remains a staple of the canon long after I am dead.’

The man made a pretense of not having already known that and handed her a contract that assigned Harper’s soul to him for eternity, and which he insisted was to be signed with her own blood, and, nodding towards her companion, said ‘I see you have brought your own witness.’

‘Yes’ she replied ‘this is Truman, who appears under another name in my novel, and who may well be a future customer of yours; he likes writing in cold blood.’

Harper then signed with a vigorous flourish, killing the querulous mocking bird of doubt in one fell swoop, and reveled in thoughts of the wages of her sin.

This piece was written for the Blog Battle Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘precious’.

Karen trawled the internet constantly, often feverishly, in search of evidence that the world was conspiring to bruise her soul at every turn. She was rarely disappointed and lived in a constant state of distress, a state she lamented to her ever-diminishing circle of online ‘friends’, her real-life friends and family having long since departed the scene. She saw this as proof-positive that the world was a cruel and oppressive place for one burdened with her natural God-given delicacy.

She had little time for others with the same affliction and affectations and would happily join in the chorus of ‘suck it up, snowflake’ abuse that their posts engendered. She saw herself as the embodiment of ‘the last guy’, made famous by Arlo Guthrie’s request of us to ‘think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody’s got it worse than that guy. Nobody in the whole world.’ Except that Karen was a woman, which made being last even more intolerable and tragic.

Over time, she began to realise that her scattergun approach to attracting sympathy was simply not gaining her enough attention. She needed to find a way to harness an army of put-upon kindred souls that would one day crown her as the Queen of Outrageous Misfortune.

Slowly she crafted a conspiracy theory that centred on a Government plot to de-sensitise the citizenry to the daily assaults on their delicate and precious sense of self. She called it the Toughen Up Plot (or TUP) and her acolytes became TuPpers, who brought forward endless stories of callousness that led to the scars known as ‘TUPper wear’.

The first to join in were the left-handed Catholics, closely followed by the victims of ‘blue and green should never be seen’ tyranny. In quick succession, they were joined by people not covered by LGBQTI+ categories such that they questioned whether in fact they existed as sentient non-binary beings, vegans traumatised by ads for butcher shops, lottery losers not offered grief counselling and comfort dogs, University students in therapy because their lecturer mentioned a writer who was not ‘woke’ and mothers who breast-fed in public who felt blanked because no-one told them they were offended, and the list kept growing.

Within hours, Karen had won the Internet. And then, suddenly, within minutes she had lost it. She had succumbed to Andy Warhol Erasure Syndrome – Optimum Media Extent (aka AWESOME). She had made the fatal mistake of becoming famous for 15 minutes and her time was up.

But, just as she thought all was lost, along came Covid and she was back in the fray, asserting her sovereign right to be an unvaccinated super-spreader and screaming her One World Government conspiracy slogans into the cameras for the Six O’Clock News.

Finally she understood her precious gift for eternal preciousness. And she lived happily ever after.

The is piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘nebulous’.

“Stan, this campaign speech simply won’t do, with all these references to targets for economic growth, employment levels, CO2 reduction, home ownership rates, let alone how we are going to handle foreign relations.”

“But, with respect, Prime Minister, these are all issues that our focus groups are telling us will sway their vote this time around and that they’re fed up with vague promises and meaningless cliches.”

“Stan, when you’ve been in this game as long as I have, you’ll understand that focus groups tell you what they think they should about those issues, which bears little resemblance to what they actually think, which is that they’re going to vote for the Party that promises them more of everything, without raising taxes.”

“Prime Minister, we included a specific question on that last matter and the vast majority were adamant that they’d be willing to pay more tax to improve education, health, the environment and employment.”

“Stan, you’re simply not listening; that’s what they say to feel better about the fact that they’ll rip to shreds anyone who actually does any such thing. I’m sorry, Stan, but I’m going to have to let you go and hire someone who really understands the concept of nebulosity as the core of democracy.”

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

Note: This piece departs from my usual humorous approach to these challenges.

As Max watched his son-in-law, David, board the train and then boarded himself, he knew two things for certain; they would both be dead soon, because David would die on this train and that he himself would die later, from terminal cancer.

Amidst the metal-on-metal soundtrack and the rock-and-roll sway of the carriage, Max ruminated on the journey that had led to this, seeing early on what David’s narcissism would bring upon the life of his daughter, Jane, and he wondered what had happened to create a world where men could do evil things and other men would not only not intervene but aid and abet.

The early warning signs were there with the litany of jobs that he walked out on because management failed to realise his self-assessed genius and gathered pace when he took out a second mortgage on their house to start a business that was going ‘to revolutionise the world of on-line marketing’, requiring expensive suits and a luxury car to impress potential investors; and then he was bankrupt and then he was violent.

Jane came to live with the widowed Max and an incensed David bombarded them both with increasingly bizarre emails and texts and when the AVO Jane took out didn’t stop the stalking and harassment and the death threats, Max knew it was time and took his old service revolver from the safe, cleaned it and loaded it.

As the train slowly emptied and the aisle between the seats became clear, Max stood and walked towards where David was sitting and David looked from Max’s face to the gun in Max’s hand and back to Max’s face and the condescending smirk that was his trademark turned to a frozen grimace.

The last words David heard were Max quoting Edmund Burke’s dictum that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’ before Max did something and pulled the trigger.

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

‘Well, Lieutenant, do you think this is the work of Cornflakes Magee, the famous cereal killer, or does it have the telltale MO of the Handlebar Kid, or maybe even the shocking hallmarks of Electric Bill?’

‘No, Sergeant. This has to be the work of Jack The Gripper, as you should have been able to deduce immediately from the contents of that grip bag that he dropped in haste: alligator clips, stillson wrench, BBQ tongs, all the usual paraphernalia, including that dead giveaway of the hardened criminal, superglue.

Obviously your next question will be, ‘where is he now?’ and, again, I would have thought that would have been obvious, even to you, Sergeant; there’s little doubt that he’s found an undercover-in-plain-sight job in the film industry as what else but a grip, a lighting and camera guy.’

‘But, Lieutenant, surely he wouldn’t want the spotlight on him like that when he knows the heat’s going to be on.’

‘On the contrary, Sergeant, he loves the attention and may be working as the key grip, the head honcho.

But my hunch is he’ll be working as a dolly grip, in which case we’ll track him down in no time.’

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

I’d been driven by my friends to an exhibition (not at a gallery but at the artist’s house or, more correctly, the artist’s parents’ house, a mudbrick two-storey faux-Gothic number nestled in a forest background), where the wine was served in pottery goblets made by a local ‘craftsperson’ who saw anything that would sit on a flat surface as hopelessly bourgeois, and the nibbles were vegan and indigestible.

Sibilant cutting remarks echoed through the faux medieval gallery, complete with its redwood refectory table that seemed to have been adzed by a blind drunk and chunky chairs that would require a backside like a mattress to endure for longer than five minutes.

The paintings themselves were of the naif school (i.e. devoid of any talent for drawing or eye for colour), consisting of a cross between Alice in Wonderland and the Kama Sutra as seen by someone tripping on LSD, and the number of red dots on them indicating sales was testimony to the number of sucker fish caught in the artist’s net.

A growing susurration led to a focus on the stairway, from which reluctantly descended a fey young man with Jesus locks and wispy beard (it wasn’t quite the Second Coming but the beatific faces of the assembled multitude would have given you pause for thought).

Overwhelmed by the moon-faced adoration of the throng, he retreated upstairs (perhaps even to Heaven?), as those that hadn’t made it to the front of the crowd tut-tutted at the insensitive behaviour of those who had.

Once that it was apparent that the wine had run out, my friends approached me and invited me to gush over the precocious talent on display and, given that it was a long walk home, I proffered ‘The images I have seen today will haunt me until I resolve them more fully’, and they nodded sagely.