This little piece of wit has just been published by McQueen’s Quinterly. http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ28/Jacquier-Flying-Saucers.aspx
humor
Rear Windows
This piece was written for the weekly Unicorn photo prompt Challenge.
‘So, how’s the leg coming on then?’
‘Another 4 weeks before I can walk on it. Driving me nuts stuck in here.’
‘You’ve got the TV and you can stream whatever you want.
‘Yes but it’s like Bruce Springsteen says. 57 channels and nothin’ on. And I’m sick of reading.’
‘You get visitors, like me.’
‘Look, no offence, mate, but you’re hardly riveting company without a pint in your hand.’
‘Hey. What’s with the chair drawn up to the window and the binoculars. You perving on the neighbours? Seen any good murders yet, Jimmy Stewart?’
‘No such luck. The odd domestic. Spotty teenager picking his nose. Mind you, I live in hope that the divorcee on the second floor will leave her bedroom blinds open one day.’
‘You can’t carry on like this. It just isn’t right. People have a right to their privacy.’
‘Privacy? They’re all screen addicts. The entire world knows what they had for dinner, who they’re practicing their horizontal folk dancing with, what they’ve been buying, what they, like, Like.’
‘Well, don’t be surprised if someone comes around and punches you in the nose or reports you to the Police.’
‘No, no chance of that happening. They get their revenge every day. Remember during Covid and everyone would get out and clap and bang saucepans for the health workers? Every night at six o’clock this lot stand at their windows, drop their kit and moon me. It’s a sea of rears in windows.’
Psychobabble
This piece was written in response to the weekly photo prompt posted by the Unicorn Challenge.
The house, closely modeled on the Bates Mansion, had gone to rack and ruin since old Ed started to lose his marbles and his self-control, leading to the snickering nick-name of Edmund Lackbladder. His faithful manservant, Bald Dick, did his perennial incompetent best, including crashing Ed’s pride and joy, his air-conditioned mower, into Ed’s personal lawn chair, dating from when he and his wife, Ernestine (nee Snortchortle), and their soccer-mad son, Whirling Eddie, used to soak up the rays on a Sunday afternoon.
In a desultory attempt at gardening, Dick gradually moved the furniture and the indoor plants outside to save them from becoming regular receptacles when Ed was caught short between rooms.
Young Eddie had long gone and fancied himself as an influencer and day trader, which is a middle-class euphemism for unemployed and unemployable. Ernestine had long gone to the Great Couturier in the sky, having suffered from recurring bouts of ennui and an infection contracted after having lip, breast and buttock implants, giving her the appearance of the Michelin man with bee sting lips.
Ed’s advanced Alzheimer’s was a health hazard for the female nurses that visited to check on him. To Ed, they were all Ernestine coming home from shopping and they were universally welcomed with heightened ardour and lowered trousers.
But most days, Ed sat skeletally in his mother’s rocking chair on the front porch, gazing at the flag he’d asked the nurses to raise, so he could remember the country where he lived.
WTF’s Balls of Fate
This piece was adapted from a much longer original version for the weekly Unicorn Challenge for up to 250 words from a photo prompt.
With his clumpy red hair, galloping acne, galumphing gait and skunk-terrifying body odour, Wilberforce Terrapin Featherstonehaugh’s dreams of becoming a major ball sports star were unlikely to ever reach fruition.
Until one day, in his basement, he found a crystal ball. He picked it up and the room plunged into darkness. A woman’s spectral voice said ‘I am Medusa and I’ve killed the lights so you won’t immediately turn into stone.’
Wilberforce stammered ‘Medusa?’
‘Yes, the genuine article. Think Cher in her prime with snakes instead of hair. I have been trapped in that ball for a hundred years and, out of gratitude, I am prepared to reward you. Tell me what thing or object over which you desire complete control for the and it shall be yours.’
Grumblebum thought long and hard for about thirty seconds and then shouted ’Balls!’
Medusa groaned. ‘You have to be kidding me. Not world peace, cancer, the internet? Why we bother with you lot passeth all godly understanding but …. balls it is.’
Back upstairs, he was watching the lottery draw as he day-dreamed about sports stardom when he suddenly thought ‘Of course! Balls!’ He could win the lottery anytime he liked and never have to worry about money again.
Some months later, head shaved, beard grown, and surgery to his sweat glands complete, William Thomas Fate (or WTF to his old friends) set out to search the world for a beautiful woman with hair that looked like writhing snakes.
Flight of the escargot
This piece was written for the weekly Unicorn Challenge to write up to 250 words in response to a photo prompt. Any resemblance to actual life in France or to the actual thought processes of snails is purely coincidental.
There I was, minding my own business, up a tree in Catalonian Barthelona, when this cherry-pickin’ monster rocks up and hurls me into a bin. I went into my shell for survival and when I was game enough to stick my head out again I discovered that, far from being a bowl, life had become a box of cherries. In a French market no less, with men shrugging as they blew Gauloise smoke into my eyes and women carrying over-laden baskets with baguettes sticking out as they gazed about with their bedroom eyes.
This is the land of the sauvage (and not the perfumed kind), I thought to myself. Over on the deli stalls sat jars of mardi foie gras gleaned from the livers of gullible force-fed geese. Beneath the tables there were a myriad of frog amputees frantically rolling their wheelchairs away in case some other part of their anatomy became a delicacy.
And of course I was only too well aware of their penchant for my own kind, calling it escargot to disguise its murderous origins. To make us edible, they starve us for days to eliminate our ability to make slime and then cook us up for the pleasure of bar patrons, who remove our corpses with toothpicks as they sip their Burgundy.
Which is why I am hurtling with as much pace as a snail can muster to find safety amongst the cabbages, leaving behind me as many snail trails as a honeymoon bed.
Six Crooked Highways 