This is my response to the Carrot Ranch’s 99-word challenge for this month about ‘wife-carrying’.

Mick picked his way carefully along the narrow track. As he reached Devil’s Elbow Cave, he planned to lay his heavy load down and take a rest. But before he could do that a man and a woman emerged from the cave. The man said “We’ll just relieve you of that burden, Mick.” Mick heard the click of the switchblade and saw the knife in the woman’s hand.

Seemingly acquiescent, Mick rolled the pack off his back, tore the top flap open and out stepped a woman holding a shotgun.

“You call that a wife? This is a wife.”

This 99 word story comes from the Carrot Ranch word prompt ‘by design’.

 

“So”, he began, “we designed the dam to help the irrigators.”

“Irrigators that grow cotton and not food?”

‘Absolutely!” he replied warily.

“Cotton to sell to Asia to be turned into T-shirts in sweat-shops?”

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

“And the fact that the food farmers downstream have ended up as peasants in their own country is dictated by the market as well?”

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

“To businesses that don’t rely on water?”

“Absolutely!”

“And you did all this by design.”

“I’m sorry, where is this heading?”

This is my entry in the Carrot Ranch’s 99 word challenge for this month with the theme of ‘open mic night’.

In the supermarket the other night, I grabbed the store open mic and announced:

“Attention all staff. Red team, please re-arrange the aisles at random to ensure customers have to search the entire supermarket to find what they want. Green team, yes, we know the chicken’s changing colour but mark it down and move it. And check-out skeleton crew, when you robo-ask a customer what they have planned for today and the customer says “I’m going home to disembowel my dog and then barbecue him for dinner”, don’t forget to say “Oh, that’s nice, are the family coming around?”

Entered into theCarrot Ranch’s Flash Fiction 99 word challenge for December with the theme of gnomes.

“Smithers, l’ve just had a call from the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, himself.”

“Cor blimey, sir.”

“He’s ordered 100,000 miniature gnomes, with Union Jack waistcoats, to be placed in the backpacks of every British soldier fighting in Europe. Imagine every Tommy going into battle with the quintessential symbol of everything that’s British nestled in his kit. God, King and garden at their backs, our brave fighting men will be invincible. They will stop at nothing to prevent the icon of this sceptered isle falling into enemy hands.”

“You can rely on me, sir, to keep the gnome fires burning!.”

 

This piece was written for this month’s Blog Battle challenge of producing a 1,000 word piece from the prompt ‘Shield’.

 

Simon’s aquiline nose, upon which perched small round glasses, conjured in Jonathon’s mind the image of a short-sighted eagle; not entirely successful as a hunter and vulnerable as prey himself.

“Your company has an impressive track record in our areas of interest, Jonathon. So what exactly can you bring to the Syndicate table that we don’t already know about?’

Jonathon’s tangled hair, with the beginnings of a grey zone, along with his fashionably stubbled cheeks, told Simon that Jonathon was not letting his youth go without a fight.

“Simon, we offer the capability to ‘translate’ linguistic nonsense and incoherent discourse into rich behaviour management data.”

“Go on.”

“I think we can agree that increasingly in this field we are finding it difficult to interpret meaning and nuance in the impoverished vocabulary of electronic communication.”

“Agreed. So, what’s your solution?”

“We started from the notion that modern meaning is hiding behind a shield of abbreviation and monosyllabic vocally-fried verbal responses, as well as contextually complex and ever-changing symbolic representations of emotions. Hence our new product, SHIELD – Synergistic High-level Integration and Extrapolation from Linguistic Disambiguation.”

Simon raised an eyebrow ever so slightly and said “Never was an acronym needed more urgently. Some examples of your success with ‘extrapolations’, if you will.”

Jonathon thought, how is it that some people in conversation can effortlessly indicate inverted commas around a phrase without using hand gestures? Must look into that later.

“Let’s start with ‘like’”

“As in Likes on Facebook?”

Jonathon tried not to transmit his internal sigh and put on his best diplomatic phrasing.

“Well, that’s an important sub-set of ‘like’ but the overall contextual unravelling requires detailed analysis of ‘like’ in language. For example, what are the deeper meanings behind someone saying “So, like, I’m in this like shopping mall and like this tattooed freak like looks at me like really weird and I’m like WTF? Like, what is his problem?”

Simon smiled wryly. “I would have thought that example would represent the antithesis of an indication of deeper meaning.”

Jonathon could feel Simon edging ever closer to the trap. “You would think so, wouldn’t you? But what if I could tell you that from that banality, in association with other intelligence from the speaker’s social media habits, we can extract rich data about their school performance, their relationship with their mother and father and what colour sneakers they will wear on any given day.”

Simon tried not to overplay his indulgent smile and his growing sense that Jonathon was trying to sell yet another short-lived app.

“Jonathon, we can already get most of that data from credit card records, social media and a myriad other sources.”

Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey, Jonathon mused.

“True, but only up to a point. Essentially that’s historical data that’s only partially predictive of future behavior. Our program can take that piece of dialogue and analyse it in real time to provide a 90% successful prediction rate of what the speaker will do today and how socially interactive they will be, based on their current physical context, including who else is in the vicinity, the number of times they use the word ‘like’ and what they are looking at in that precise moment in time.”

“And how exactly do you obtain this information”

“From their umbilical cord; their phone.”

“OK, we’ve been chatting for a while now. What can you tell me about myself that I don’t already know or the phone company doesn’t know or my ISP doesn’t know?”

“Simon, I am but a bear of little brain and my pathetically inefficient neurones can only make educated but notoriously imperfect guesses. However, our software can do exactly that once I have access to your phone.”

Simon thought he’d spotted the fatal flaw in Jonathon’s scheme.

“But what if I don’t want to give you that access by putting your software on my phone?”

“Oh, we already have our software on your phone.”

“How?”

“It’s embedded in almost all of your other useful apps.”

“But surely that’s illegal?”

“Not at all. It’s in the terms and conditions you agreed to when you downloaded those apps.”

“Who’s got time to read those?”

“Exactly. Which is how we’ve sold your soul to the Devil and acquired the rights to your first-born son.”

“What?!!!!”

Jonathon chuckled inwardly. The look on Simon’s face was priceless.

“Kidding.” He paused for effect. “Mostly.”

Simon was now truly rattled and it was Jonathon who was rattling the firmly secured cage. He decided to counter with one last haymaker.

“The example you gave was based on dialogue. My daughters only communicate with me in one word answers, grunts, sighs and eye-rolls. What’s that going to tell you?”

“Everything. Their phones never leave their sides, right? So we know what time of the day each of those actions occurred, in whose direction they were looking, who else was in the room and much more. Combined with their other electronic data and the algorithms we have developed from millions of their socio-economic peers, we can tell you what each of those grunts and eye-rolls mean, if anything.

“What do you mean ‘if anything’?”

“Some of those behaviours are simply learned reflexes, like ducking when a bird swoops, and our software knows that.”

“OK, say I’m convinced by the technology. (Jonathon heard the cage door slam shut.) What about all the ethical dilemmas it brings?”

“Simon, all of your current shareholders will be dead before that’s fully understood and you yourself will have shuffled off the mortal coil as a relatively impoverished man, leaving behind a resentful wife and children who will know what they could have had.”

Defeatedly, knowing what the Syndicate would decide, Simon said “Alright, I’ll put it to the Syndicate but I can’t promise anything.”

“Thank you, Simon, that’s all I’m asking.”

“By the way, what’s the algorithm in your product called?”

“Protocol for Assessing Relational Energy Needed with Teenagers or PARENT for short.”

Note: This story has been submitted to the Australian Writers Centre for their monthly 500 word maximum Furious Fiction competition. This month’s challenge was for the action to occur on a train, to include something frozen and include three consecutive three-word sentences.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

As Max watched his son-in-law, David, board the train, he knew one thing for certain; they would both be dead soon. David would die first. Today. On this train. Max would die later, from terminal cancer. To be sure David hadn’t seen him, Max boarded just as the train was about to leave.

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.

His daughter, Jane, couldn’t see it, not back then, but Max could foresee the inevitable apocalypse that David’s narcissism would bring upon the lives of Jane and their children.

The early warning signs were there when David insisted Jane wear flat heels when they got married, so she wouldn’t be taller than him in the wedding photos. Then came the litany of jobs that he walked out on because management failed to realise his self-assessed genius.

Max hoped the arrival of the twins might moderate David’s behavior but all it brought was more nights drinking with his mates and a new propensity for Jane to walk into doors, followed by extravagant presents of remorse for Jane and the children.

The downward spiral gathered pace when David demanded control of the finances and took out a second mortgage on their house to start a business that was going ‘to revolutionise the world of on-line marketing’. He needed expensive suits and a luxury car to impress potential investors. And then he was bankrupt.

Jane brought the children to live with the widowed Max and started divorce proceedings. Incensed, David bombarded them both with increasingly bizarre emails and texts, saying that he was going to get custody of the kids, no matter what it took. The AVO Jane took out didn’t stop the stalking and harassment. His IT mates always found a way to track her, no matter how many times she changed her phone and email.

At night, Max wondered what had happened to create a world where men could do such things and other men would not only not intervene but aid and abet. In Max’s world, men fixed things that were broken.

When the Family Court inexplicably granted David permission for the children to stay at his flat for the weekend, Max could foresee David’s vengefulness unfolding on the evening news. He took his old service revolver from the safe. It was time.

As the train slowly emptied and the aisle between the seats became clear, Max stood and walked towards where David was sitting and stopped, facing him. Eyes fixed on his phone screen, it took a moment for David to notice Max. When he did, he 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.

Max did something. David was dead. Jane was free.