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Competition No 3802

Set by John O'Byrne, 6 October

We asked for top writers on small subjects.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Even those who didn't win sent in some crackers, as in The Life of a Pie, Two Metres Under the Sea and The Old Man and the Seaweed. £20 to each winner. Adrian Fry is the best, and so also gets the vouchers.

Gulliver's Walks

Gulliver strolled to the farm to buy some eggs. He saw some children playing. "How big I must look to them," he thought. Two tall men on horseback cantered by. "How small I must appear to them and how noble those fine horses are." He bought some eggs from the farmer and walked back to his house. As he sliced the top off his boiled egg from the little end he came to the conclusion that: "East, west, home's best."

Lisbeth Rake

Briefing For a Descent Into Hull

Yes, yes, the A63, you think this is the way in? It is, at the junction with the A1079. Oh, now I am going down to the docks, round and around and around, to admire the glass-glinting shopping centre at Princes Quay, where my love may look out at the marina, all shipshape and fishy. Fish, fish about.

Suggested treatment. 50mg Zanaflex, 200mg desipramine hydrochloride, 5tpd. This boy is depressed. DOCTOR X.

Disagree. Suggest exciting visit to Wilberforce museum on slavery. That will cheer him up. DOCTOR Y.

But if I find a cycle, a wheel of fortune, I will ride it, won't I? Like Larkin, all specs and spooks. Along and across Whitefriargate, where the pedestrians maunder and murmur, and marvel that Marvell was the town's MP, marvellous Hull, Kingston-upon-Hull, where the fish fly through the air from crate to crate, and visit the cobbled alleys off the high street, very interesting indeed. A whale of time, once there were whales here, oh the flensing and the blabber over the blubber and ahoy, prescott John, prester John, presto John, the jaguar coils to spring. Round and around and around.

All right, you win. In fact, double the dose. DOCTOR Y.

Bill Greenwell

Flaubert's Robin

I took the road to Rouen with only moderate hopes, as all the birds of that region had been shot and eaten long ago. When I got to the Musee des Oiseaux Extraordinaires, a nondescript building in the Place des Gourmands, I did find one moth-eaten bird which might, at some stage in its little life, have been a robin. But how could I be sure?

My wife has always been faithful to me. Is despair wrong under such circumstances? I am only a doctor with an interest in writers' pets and yet I yearn to know the truth about the agonies of cuckoldry. When I phoned to tell her my doubts about the robin in the Musee, she sounded distracted. I imagined the harmless, unimposing presence of our next-door neighbour, come over to help with some household chore . . . It was futile to speculate.

I drank a cafe au lait in the Place des Gourmands and read the latest edition of Dead Writers' Pets Monthly. Apparently Flaubert had never owned a robin, but he was very fond of beetles . . . I decided to take the road to Croisset.

Josh Ekroy

Jonathan Livingston Carpet Beetle

So what if there were a whole world out there? He knew his place, and his place was under the piano. Most beetles didn't venture out of the room they were hatched in, and neither had he. It was eating that mattered, and he was good at it. He was equipped to tackle hessian, plasticised triple-spun merino, even polyethylene close-weave. Already he'd consumed a patch of Wilton heather-mix cord. The vicissitudes of life passed him by. A happy little bug was he. His life was an inspirational example? It was redolent with transcendental spirituality? A pop philosophical allegory? Hah! Nobody could gull him! Message? What message? Well-chewed carpet fibre to that!

Anne Du Croz

Cocoa Nights

Prentice liked a cup of cocoa. Of all the tiny pleasures of his life in Shepperton's securely gated, electronically monitored retirement community, the evening cup of cocoa was the one to which he looked forward with the greatest anticipation. In much earlier days, as a practising psychologist, Prentice might have analysed his almost religious devotion to evening cocoa. Now, he licked his dry lips, imagining the warm, milky coating his tentative sips would give them.

"I like a cup of cocoa," he said, unsure if he'd made the comment before or merely thought it; but it bore repetition.

"I see our new neighbour's moved in," Prentice's wife called from the kitchen. "Perhaps we could invite him over."

"For a cup of cocoa," he murmured.

"He used to be an aviator, apparently."

Prentice felt uneasy. Their last neighbour,

a psychiatrist, had kept to himself, then committed suicide by ploughing his Jaguar into a drained swimming pool. Significantly, he hadn't liked cocoa.

"I hope he likes cocoa," said Prentice.

Adrian Fry

No 3805 Set by Brendan O'Byrne

Use a shopworn phrase in a way that nullifies its real meaning or intent - eg, "Would it have killed him to leave a suicide note?"; "The silence was music to my ears"; "I swear to God, I'm agnostic!"

As many as you like by 7 November. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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