The Press Gang

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Story challenge, with the prompt word of 'distraction'. Davo and his retired mates were watching the TV news at their local pub when a report on the bushfires included a reporter shoving a microphone in the face of a woman whose house had been destroyed, killing her …

Driving yourself to distraction

Bernadette finished primary and secondary school without learning to read (just like her parents), so she couldn’t get a drivers licence or read the labels in the supermarket, but she got a job in a factory when she was 16, until a robot replaced her, so she decided to have a baby. Fergus was 19 …

Blood brothers

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge with the prompt word of 'shift'. The longer the years stretched out, the sooner that Garth expected to receive the call that it was his turn to remove some heinous citizen that had escaped the clutches of the law and thus thought themselves not only free …

Sour kemo sabe

This piece is in response to the Six Sentence challenge, using the prompt word of 'center' As The Lone Ranger and Tonto came over a ridge, from a small ranch-house they heard a woman’s cry, shrill and piercing. They galloped towards the ranch-house and before they could dismount, a woman ran towards them, clutching a …

Behind the scenes

This piece was written for the weekly Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of 'bowl', As many of you know, when I single-handedly won the war with Antarctica (quibblers may suggest that’s because I was the only one who turned up), I donned my dinner suit and danced with the penguins well into the …

The myth of Hamish

My entry in this month's Blog Battle with the prompt word of 'myth'. (Revised version of an earlier story.) It was Hamish who first noticed it. We were sitting in the back room of the abandoned offices that were our temporary home when he said ‘You know, we could be brothers.’ I was a little …

Alternative justice

This piece was written for the Six Sentence story challenge, with the prompt word of 'alternative'. The magistrate for the far-flung region of Beyond The Black Stump, Joseph ‘Cocker’ Mamie was known for dispensing the kind of judgements that bordered on frontier-style but were always begrudgingly accepted by its citizens as justice, even if a …

Sunburnt London and the cunning cabbie

This is my first overseas trip beyond Asia and my first chance to meet face to face with some of our sister organisations from other countries. We land as the sun is rising in a clear sky. I take the shuttle bus to my hotel on the South Bank and along the way get to …

Seasonal Variations

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word of 'season'. Barnaby took an elastical approach to the Ecclesiastical wisdom that to everything there is a season; the advent of 24/7/365 sports coverage meant that somewhere north or south of the Equator someone, somewhere, was getting obscenely rich by entertaining the …

Angus finds love

Angus Hardy’s heart beat only for the imported American teacher, Miss Anderson. Her Southern accent, as thick as honey, tantalised his pubescent ears and left him silent and still in his appointed place in the classroom. Her green eyes, set in her lightly freckled face, mesmerised him. He imagined they were looking deep into his …