This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘eruption’. Gone for a creative non-fiction approach on this one.

Mount Tambora is a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia and in 1815 it produced the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

The ash from the eruption column dispersed around the world and in 1816 lowered global temperatures in an event sometimes known in the Northern Hemisphere as ‘The Year Without A Summer’.

Charles Dickens was aged four at the time and a Little Ice-Age affected London for several years afterwards.

Although he didn’t write A Christmas Carol until 1843, the childhood memories must have come flooding back as he started his work.

Ironically, Dickens main motivation was to expose British social attitudes towards poverty, particularly child poverty, but the story ended up creating an enduring middle class vision of feasting, roaring fires and Christmas carols.

In that sense, it seems that eruptions could be far more aptly called disruptions, in a world where the only constant revolutions are the spinning of the Earth that the meek are yet to inherit.

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

Ever since Bruce had his stroke, he doesn’t do much more than sit on his front veranda and, with his good hand, knuckle the head of his arthritic companion, a German Shepherd called Arfer, although these days the best that Bruce can manage is Ar’er but Arfer knows what he means.

Bruce can still shuffle-walk and dress and he prides himself on cleanly, if awkwardly, shaving each day with his safety razor, taking care to leave the electric one his daughter gave him on display in his bathroom, and being especially careful of nicks on the days she visits.

He looks at his now dead but once prized front lawn (groomed obsessively with his old Victa mower that he never saw any need to replace), where the children would play under the sprinkler in the summertime and where his son was once convinced he’d stood on a bee, creating drama until ice-cream was produced for distraction and the bindii prickle removed.

Every day his seemingly semi-comatose fat teenage grandson (named Jaxxon by his pea-brained parents,) the one with the tattoos and the safety pin through his eyebrow, arrives en route to the shops, never once lifting his eyes from his screen, even as he mumbles ‘Sup, Gramps’. He takes Arfer as his token protection, because his bark is still enough to scare away God-botherers and dodgy roof repair salesmen from Bruce and neighbourhood bullies from the boy.

The one thing Bruce looks forward to is the days that the aged care agency send their revolving door of male/female/gay/straight/non-binary shower people, not because he ever feels particularly unclean (he is obsessive with his wiping, if nothing else) but because it’s the only time anyone gently touches his skin since his wife went to Heaven without him.

These pieces were written for Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘key’.

Can you dig these ‘ere worms?

No point in a brand new pair of roller skates (even if you’ve got a brand new key)

when you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd,

especially since I heard it through the grapevine

that there’s a flying purple people eater

wearing a yellow polka dot bikini

on the highway to hell.

The key to good design

Engineer: “The key to understanding the need for this dam is that it’s designed to help cotton growers.”

Reporter: “So these would be irrigators that grow cotton to ship to Asia to be turned into T-shirts in sweat-shops and sent back to us to be turned into landfill?”

Engineer: “Well, we don’t dictate the market ….”

Reporter: “And the fact that the food farmers downstream of the dam will end up as peasants in their own country, is that dictated by the market as well?”

Engineer: “We’re running workshops for them on how they can adjust their business model.”

Reporter: “To businesses that don’t rely on water.”

Engineer: “I’m sorry, what’s your cotton-pickin’ point?”

These two pieces were written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘edge’. One for fun and one for reflection, and a bonus film clip.

-edge as a suffix (extract from Wackypedia)

‘edge – border for a Cockney garden

Straightedge – Cockney garden border after trimming

Knowledge – from the Old English ‘know ledge’, seat in exam room adjoining the Precipice of ‘F’

Foreknowledge – (Golfing term) knowing when you are about to be struck by a golf ball

Sandwedge – cheese between two slices of bread, snack often carried by golfers

Priviledge – bench in rich person’s outhouse

On the edge of reality

When Alex opened the fridge, there was fresh food in the house, so he reasoned he must have gone shopping.

He must have done because he had less money than he did yesterday and he remembered Annie at the shop apologising for having to give him so many coins in his change

It was increasingly important to have these reference points, although sometimes he was not really sure whether a day or even several days had passed.

It was sufficient to Alex’s purposes that he believed he was alive and could appear sufficiently coherent, because his soul-grinding fear was that ‘They’ would put him away in some sort of institution one day.

He didn’t believe he was mad or demented as much as disconnected from constants and attachments, which in his more reflective moments he conceded could be seen as madness by some. 

So he needed to be watchful and that seemed like a cruel and unusual punishment for a man who simply wanted to be left alone.

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

When Raymond saw beggars on the streets, rattling their plastic cups in the hope of loose change, he wished the government would solve the problem but then next day he would worry that might involve raising taxes.

When Raymond read that the next world war would be fought over water, he would think we should share that elixir of life, but the next day, beer in hand, he would watch his automatic sprinklers spraying his manicured lawn and wonder why the government wasn’t doing more to seed the clouds.

When Raymond was told that full employment in a permanent job was a pipedream in a modern economy, he shook his head but the next day he ordered a wine thermometer from Amazon and dialed for a home-delivered meal.

When Raymond’s mother became old and demented and needed a nursing home, he thought about getting her the best care possible but the next day he thought there was no sense in wasting money when she wouldn’t know the difference.

When Raymond saw people demonstrating about gun control laws after the latest school massacre, he thought about joining them but the next day he thought he’d probably like to keep his guns.

When Raymond dies, nothing will really change; he’ll still be nothing, if not fluid.

Two for one today in response to the Divine Denise’s Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘detour’.

Detourmentia

It began with her putting the kettle in the fridge and calling everybody ‘darling’ because she couldn’t remember their names. Then she copied the young women’s craze for ash-blond streaks in her hair and started sending money to the man in Africa that she’d met on a dating site. Her rooms were soon full with goods that she’d bought online, boxes unopened. Only when she bought a gleaming white sports convertible and drove it into town to browse the clothes shops, wearing only a fur coat and her underwear, did her daughters put her in a nursing home. In her garage they found her collection: No Stopping. No U-turn. One Way. Steep Descent. All the signs were there.

Ted’s famous cattle drive

Ted watched his grandson, Artemus, alight from the school bus and they began their weekday ritual of walking home, where Grandma Rose would be waiting with home-made biscuits warm from the oven and chocolate-flavoured milk. Ted said “Ya know, Artie, (damned if he was going to call him by that pretentious name his son and daughter-in-law had picked) when I was your age we walked three miles to school, even if it was snowing.”

Artie sighed “You did not, Grandpa, Great Aunt Sally told me you lived practically next door.”

That bloody sister of mine and her big mouth again, thought Ted as they walked on in silence for a while, until he said “Ya know, Artie, I once drove a mob of cattle from Queensland to Tasmania.”

“Grandpa, Tasmania is an island, so how did you cross Bass Strait?”

Smart Alec kid, thought Ted and said “I took a detour.”

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

Brad realised later that he should have been expecting it but when he arrived at the church for his second wedding, he was surprised to find a shiny black hearse wrapped in a black ribbon and bow (and filled with confetti) blocking the entrance, and with all of its tyres let down so it couldn’t be moved.

Just like he should have been suspicious when his first wife, Brenda, had seemed happy after the divorce to hand over to him the expensive leather Chesterfield furniture they’d bought together, only to find a few weeks later that she’d inserted frozen fish into the base of the couch and two recliners, which became only too apparent after a week or so of central heating.

Life had just been getting back on to an even keel after an ‘anonymous’ (aka Brenda) fake news tip-off to the Taxation Office that Brad and his new fiancé, Angelique (she of the Grand Canyon cleavage and the non-child-bearing hips), were laundering money for a Colombian drug cartel.

Brad had pleaded his case with Brenda that he had only instigated the divorce after her affair with his brother, Kingsley, but she dismissed his outrage by claiming one-night stands didn’t really count in the grand scheme of things and, besides, Kingsley was a lousy lay anyway, which she reasoned Brad could use to unsettle him the next time they played golf.

So unfolded their divorce, which made Armageddon look like a genteel tea party and which paid for their respective lawyers’ holiday homes and their wives’ cosmetic surgery in Paris and their children’s university fees.

Brad reasoned that it was all worth it in exchange for a life of wedded bliss with the magnificent Angelique, until a Lamborghini swept up the church driveway, paused just long enough for him to see the passionate embrace and deep kiss between Brenda and Angelique, and then sped off into the setting sun.

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

Here at Splendiferous* Pharmaceuticals and Incomparable Narcotics (SPIN), we understand the pain and misery suffered by people who have an impaired ability to take charge of their lives in the way that our handsome and beautiful blonde smiling models have, demonstrated by them cycling together around the neighbourhood (wearing their helmets of course) or playing together in their manicured backyard.

Our range of non-addictive products put you back in control of whatever it is you desire in order to achieve self-fulfillment, nirvana, mindfulness and total awesomeness, in comparison to the chaos of random individuality that afflicts so many (as independently tested in our SPIN laboratories by people who would never lie to keep their job).

Some of you will have heard of our prison-emptying product, ConTroll©, a discreet device attached to the wearer’s lockable underwear that sends Bluetooth signals to and from the brain 24/7; at the first contemplation of any misdemeanour or crime, the device wearer loses all control of their bodily functions (as we say, s**t doesn’t happen because s**t happens if it does).

Our newest release is Fat Controller (under licence from Thomas the Tank Engine Inc), which is an implant in your jaw that snaps it shut at the first sight of fast food or chocolate (and no, despite the rumours, we are not in negotiations with McDonalds for a scratch-and-win bypass key).

More familiar to most of you will be our Content-mint© pills, patches and nasal sprays (absolutely non-addictive and available without prescription) that slow down your metabolism to the ideal chill range for the circumstances (see our Netflix bundle deal for massive savings on both).

Finally, congratulations to Buckbuck McGurk, a chicken farmer from Redneck, South Australia, who has just won our SPIN slogan competition with ‘If you’re out of Control, you’re out of control’**; a lifetime supply is on its way!

* Borrowed from the immortal Zorba the Greek, who was definitely out of control. https://youtu.be/RPaSQ2Fda98

** Re-purposed from ‘If you eat All-Bran, you don’t need All-Bran’.