Lucy Vickery

Six plus

In Competition No. 3038 you were invited to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’.
 
Long before Twitter, so legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turns out to be a load of old cobblers — at least according to Frederick A. Wright who, in a 2012 essay, concluded that there was no evidence that Papa was responsible for the story. In fact, versions of it had been in circulation from 1906 (when Hemingway was seven years old).
 
Regardless of who wrote it, the six-word story seemed to capture your imagination inspiring sequels that ranged far and wide, from Scandi noir to Conan Doyle. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30.



‘They bought it,’ said Myra.
‘Them,’ corrected Frank.
‘No, no, the idea. They fell for the suggestion that the littl’un was dead.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘So,’ Myra continued, ‘if we want to get shot of the car, say…’
‘…we suggest that family tragedy is behind it! Brilliant! Both owners have lost a leg in a car crash! Sale!’
‘Better a train crash, Frank. Don’t want them suspicious.’
‘For sale: a garden, never glimpsed.’
‘Blindness has struck! Not a dickybird, a tragedy, lawn untrodden! Ker-ching!’
The postman’s rap was vigorous: he had sacks of cheques for them, a measure of local, national and even international sympathy. And the cards, pastel pinks and blues, so sorry for their loss.
Their judge (who may or may not have been called Hemingway) was a literature graduate. ‘Implication is not actuality,’ he insisted. ‘Keep your millions.’
It was the begging letters that finished them.
Bill Greenwell
 
I know golfers with every iron who never put in a round and gourmets whose kitchens are equipped with everything but food. Yet when I tell people that my wife and I have all the trappings of a child without the thing itself, they edge away.













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