In Competition No. 2607 you were invited to submit a piece of verbless prose (present participles used as adjectives or nouns were permissible).
‘Invaders, dictators, usurpers of our literature,’ boomed the French writer Michel Thaler in the preface to his verb-free novel Le train de nulle part, published in 2004. His hatred of the doing word was such that he organised a symbolic, and well-attended, burial ceremony for it at the Sorbonne. There was a revolutionary mood in the ranks this week, with mutterings in the entry about the pointlessness of this kind of challenge. But it did produce a lively and varied postbag that was a pleasure to judge. On particularly cracking form were David Silverman, Esdon Frost and Seree Zohar. They were narrowly beaten by the winners, printed below, who get £30 each. Celeste Francis get the bonus fiver.
‘Something of a bloodbath here, Sergeant Greenwell.’
‘Unfortunately so, sir.’
‘Any leads?’
‘Yes, sir. Plus several witnesses. A few with positive sightings of two notorious local gangs, The Nouns and The Verbs; quite a history of violence between them. The same old thing usually: a few taunts, threats, that sort of stuff, then the inevitable scuffle. This time round, however, with some of them in possession of knives… well, a rather darker outcome.’
‘Casualties from both the gangs or just one?’
‘Reputedly just The Verbs, sir. Possibly a complete annihilation of the entire gang, but no confirmation as yet. P Team on full alert though, as a safeguard against potential incoherence of spoken and written language.’
‘P Team, Greenwell?’
‘Extra participles, prepositions and punctuation, sir.’
‘Ah. Good work, Greenwell.’
‘Quite a serious case of verbal abuse, eh, sir?’
‘No crappy jokes, please, Greenwell.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
Celeste Francis
Below me, to my right, Gomorrah, a great industrial metropolis, till an hour ago full of noise and bustle and feverish activity, some, sadly, of a kind too coarse for description, an abomination to the eyes of my merciful God, once a city of universal renown, mighty as any east of Eden, and now a desolation of black ashes; and to my left, dark smoke over its once beautiful rooftops, great and powerful Sodom, now just a mess of marble, brick and gopher wood, two cities of the plain, cities of my infancy, cities of commerce and foreign dealings, both in ruins by the hand of the Lord’s righteous angels; and here beside me, O foolishly curious woman, O my lovely wife, now a pillar of salt, lifeless as the sand dunes of the desert, bitter as the tears on my cheeks: why, O why?
Frank McDonald
Dear Mum,
Monastery now incontrovertibly a mistake; mea culpa ha bloody ha and apologies for my stubborn disregard for parental counsel on this.
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