The naif fisherman

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word of 'net'. I’d been driven by my friends to an exhibition (not at a gallery but at the artist’s house or, more correctly, the artist’s parents’ house, a mudbrick two-storey faux-Gothic number nestled in a forest background), where the wine was served …

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 …

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 …

The rescued quarter pig

This piece was written for the weekly Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word of 'quarter'. Every evening I'd see my neighbours out walking their dogs and I decided I should get one as well, so one Saturday I went for a country drive to see if there were any signs out advertising new litters. …

Christmas presence

This piece was re-worked from an earlier version for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word 'presence'. Who knows how long this will last but whatever each generation brings, there will be totems of the past fixed firmly insistent in each of our minds, totems with faces carved in the hard woods that only …

The Powerful Jab

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge, with the prompt word of 'powerful'. Morgan’s sententious diatribe, elucidating to the assembled dinner party his unsolicited views on a divisive issue, had lasted through the better part of two bottles of wine, the latter of which was the bottle that Morgan had brought to the …