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

After Arabella had finished lamenting the loss of her latest boyfriend, Babs breathlessly unloaded that the trouble with Arabella was that she was insufficiently bubbly, too po-faced, not enough fizz, and that guys don’t want to know about what you think about global warming, and they want to know what you think about warming them up (at least by the second date), whether you’ll laugh at all their stupid jokes, whether you can take a ‘joke’ and, by the third date, whether you have any money.

Arabella nodded but was actually appalled by the idea that she would have to be an airhead to attract a man, so the next time she was out at a social event and a man approached her, before he could speak, she blurted out ‘I’m a committed environmentalist, I hate jokes and I’m as poor as a church mouse.’

The man smiled and said ‘Ditto’ and would she like to accompany him to the Natural History Museum this Sunday because he’d heard there was a very powerful exhibition on the effects of plastics in oceans.

Agreeably stunned, Arabella said she’d love to and then he said ‘I don’t have a car, can you pick me up?’ and she said of course and dutifully arrived in her Mercedes sports car on Sunday at the address he’d given her.

He said he’d had a better idea; a friend had loaned him his speedboat and they could go looking for dolphins, which delighted Arabella, until mid-boat-trip he stopped the engine, dropped his pants and lunged at her, with his willie wagging like a metronome.

Arabella’s self-defense training kicked in instinctively and, while the man was still groin-groaning, she threw him overboard and, ignoring his pleas that he couldn’t swim, she watched him go under with a myriad bubbles rising to the surface and she felt quite …effervescent.

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

Photo courtesy Getty Images

It was the 1950’s and a three-year-old boy called out in the night for a ‘gink of water’ and when his father answered his call and handed the boy the plastic child-sized cup which he would normally easily grip two-handed, this time it fell straight through his fingers, and then again.

At the small country hospital an hour’s drive away, the sleep-deprived doctor, called in by the concerned nurses, swiftly diagnosed suspected poliomyelitis and the ambulance sped into the night for the city, a two-hour journey, while in the back the boy stopped breathing three times and had to be revived.

For a while he lived in a tubular respirator machine, an iron lung, with only his head exposed and he had to look up into a mirror to see the medical ward and the staff, and his parents, when they could visit between work and caring for his older sister three hours away.

Weeks went by before he could breathe by himself and the arduous journey for he and his mother, of returning his limbs to functioning like they used to before, began.

Months of being strapped to a board to straighten his limbs, wearing calipers on his legs and daily physiotherapy invented by a Queensland bush nurse brought him back to the world of other children.

If the joy of seeing your child walk unassisted for the first time can be overwhelming for parents, it pales against seeing your four-year-old emerge from a world of ambulances, iron lungs and daily treatments to once again, simply walk and get himself a drink of water.

This amusement was written for D’Verse’s prompt to write 144 words of prose that must include this line from Shel Silverstein’s poem, Invitation. ‘If you’re a dreamer, come in.’

If you are a dreamer, come in to Beelzebub’s Emporium of Chance here at the Hades Hotel in downtown Inferno. Every day’s your lucky day when you visit us. We’ve got Hot Slots, Ring of Fire Roulette, BBQ Blackjack, Jalapeno Keno and Red Hot Poker (hands so sizzling even Texans can’t hold ‘em). Take advantage of our free drinks service, including Lava on the Rocks, Tequila Sunburn and Devilled Daquiri. When you’re hungry, drop in to our Hara Kiri Curry House or our Eternal Charcoal Grill, at the end of Barefoot Fire Walk. If you need a nap, go up to your Personalised Rack Room and stretch out for as long as you need. Short on cash? Not a problem. Our Soul Seller Tellers will be only too happy to help out. Yes, for that complete Holiday from Hell, we have every taste covered.

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch’s weekly 99-word flash fiction challenge, with the prompt of ‘rethink the hero’.

A ballsy Amazon, with a prodigious cleavage and legs that go all the way up to her backside, storms into a cave and kicks the crap out of The Devil Personified and, supposedly, women everywhere cheer. The fact that her methodology replicates that of her foe is, supposedly, irrelevant to the sweetness of her revenge.

Meanwhile, a woman, with breasts streaked from breastfeeding and whose legs end at her knees, stands in her cavernous kitchen, surrounded by children abandoned by their father, and turns beef mince into basic burgers cheaper than McDonalds. She doesn’t have time to imagine heroism.

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

The former country pile had been the home of the descendants of the robber baron, the Earl of Mickelmouse, but had fallen into disrepair after the last of the line accidentally wandered into the front line during the Battle of the Somme while looking for the Officers Mess.

However, it had a brief but spectacular revival in the 1960’s when it was bought by R.G. Baji (nee John Smith), the lead singer of The Psychedelic Frogs, who’d had world-wide hits with ‘I lick your skin and I’m in heaven’ and ‘Maharishi, be mine tonight’, but who was now sick of touring and bought the derelict mansion, promptly re-naming it the Mickelmouse Club.

The Press fell over themselves with their increasingly salacious stories about the goings-on at the Club (describing the residents as Micklemouseketeers), including the importing of a herd of elephants, the construction of a fully heated greenhouse, drug-crazed orgies that went on for days and more nudity than the local twitchers could keep up with but they saved their greatest concocted outrage for when R.G. declared himself Lord Micklemouse and stood (unsuccessfully) for Parliament.

Despite it’s reputation in the media, the Mickelmouse Club became home to many a misfit escapee from suburban kitsch and the mainstream strictures of art and literature and, while it’s true that a certain amount of a horizontal folk dancing and imbibing of illegal substances did occur, it was a far more productive hub of creativity than many give it credit for in these Instagram times.

It was from here that Siouxsie Pocahontas (nee Sally Blodgett) developed her unique sense of clothing that later filled chain stores with her plastic Boadicea breastplates and miniskirts made from rat skins, not to mention that great writer, A. Man, and his masterpiece, ‘The Devil and the Tooth Fairy’.

Alas, the Mickelmouse Club is no more and, after reverting to his birth name, John Smith is now a Minister in the Tory Government (a peerage is rumoured to be impending) and he proceeds with the restoration of Mickelmouse, courtesy of a substantial grant from the National Trust.

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

Albert A. Stone did not want to be just another cog in the wheel of life, meshing with others to make some soulless machine rotate endlessly, although he could imagine deriving some perverse pleasure, for a short time at least, in being part of a reverse gear.

So he set himself the task of achieving what the laws of thermodynamics (and the entire scientific cheer squad for the immutability of such laws) said was impossible, namely creating a perpetual motion machine i.e. a machine once started that would function forever without any additional energy being supplied.

Sitting in front of his computer he read everything that Lord Google could tell him about perpetual motion, it’s supposed impossibility, all the experiments and theories that had failed and the ultimate indignity of the Patents Office refusing to even accept an application for any invention based on the purported existence of perpetual motion.

And then, as he checked the latest social media posts, he realised that the answer was staring back at him from the screen; the archetypal perpetual motion machine was the conspiracy theory that never died, like the cars that could run on water that had been spiked by Big Oil, the vaccines that the secret One World Government were using to control the world, the ‘evidence’ that 9/11 was stage managed by sinister sources within Government, the ‘Moon landing’ filmed in a Hollywood studio, and aliens living in seemingly human host bodies.

To prove his theory, he decided to construct his own perpetual motion machine experiment by inventing a Big Lie and monitoring its progress through popular culture and social media, to prove once and for all that perpetual motion not only existed but instances of it would never die.

After an exhaustive process, Albert hit on the idea that every electronic chip in computers, phones, TV sets, cars, credit cards, passports, domestic pet IDs etc is, in fact, a tiny two-way transmitter that matches the updatable chip secretly inserted into you in the maternity ward and which monitors your every thought and action, so that you can be automatically re-educated into thinking exactly what (insert whatever version of Big Brother is current at the time) wants you to think, and he launched his experiment with excitement and anticipation of vindication.

This piece of fluff was written for the D’Verse Poetics challenge to write a laundry poem.

When the permanent press get a whiff

and start to sniff

the stained seats of power,

they start to front-load the ‘news’

and then rinse and repeat

until their designated target gets the heat

of the hearsay tumble dryer

or gets pegged out to dry in the summer sun.

Then begins the target’s spin cycle

and the fluffing of the facts

to ensure the wrinkles are ironed out

and any stains are bleached

with the lye soap of fake news

until the target comes out lemon fresh

and looking whiter than white

and the cycle moves on

to the next 24 in the 7.

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge with the prompt of ‘escape’.

You could resign, storm out in high dudgeon and let the cards fall where they may. You could fantasise about finding another job where your skills are finally appreciated and imagine submitting your resignation with an air of smugness. You could become unmanageable and take the fired escape. (Except there’s the money, your unemployable middle age, the mortgage and the kids and your partner’s anger and the looming wasteland of your irrelevance to your former colleagues.) Or you could accept that you built this escape-proof prison and raise birds to release through the bars, before they become like you.

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word ‘service.

Here at (insert name of corporation, business, government agency, etc) we value our service to our customers extremely highly and we do all that we can to ensure complete customer satisfaction in all our interactions.

From our highly professional call centre in (insert name of city here – Mumbai, Manila, Johannesburg etc) where our eager staff will read to you from their on-screen decision tree until they run out of options (or English) and then promise that their supervisor will call you shortly, through to our virtual assistant lurking in the bottom right hand corner of your screen that is amazingly accurate in being just as helpful as our human staff, you can be assured that we are here to help.

We are experiencing a high volume of calls and emails at this time due to (insert unforeseen circumstance e.g. Friday, Christmas, Chinese New Year etc), so wait times for your call or email to be answered may be longer than usual and we thank you for your patience and know that we know that you are always a valued customer.

We welcome your feedback, both positive and negative, and any complaints you have will be our top priority, so simply send them to our Complaints Supervisor at the email address that you’ll find on Page 17 of our FAQs. Note: We advise that we are experiencing a high volume of complaints at this time so wait times for your complaint to be addressed may be longer than usual. Or please feel free to drop into our Head Office at 666 Main Street, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

This piece was submitted to the D’Verse Prosery Possibilities page, with the condition that the following quote in full had to be included in a 144 word story. “I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.” Wisława Szymborska, “Possibilities”

“Just one last question, Mr. Khan. We’ve covered the unification of the Mongol tribes, developing the Silk Road, controlling huge areas of the world as your conquering armies dominated parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and, of course, Asia. We’ve covered your revolutionary military tactics, your complete trust in your generals, and your enlightened views on many aspects of society and religion. However it would seem that history may remember you most for your unmerciful slaughter of millions of innocent people and the annexation of their lands.  Tell me, is there a geographical line somewhere in your head where you will stand and be satisfied that you have achieved all of your dreams ?”

Genghis thought for several minutes about this and then said “The horizon, because I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.”