The challenge? Write a story in exactly 6 sentences based on Denise’s one word prompt: SACK. Visit, comment, and write & post your own on SIX SENTENCE STORIES. (Link goes active Wed night) The Café is open. Come as you are!
The game of Mumblety-Peg went on as expected…and on and on: two gnomes stand face-to-face about two feet apart; the thrower hurls a knife into the lawn between the bettor’s wide-spread feet; the knife nearly always lands point down; if the knife lands point down and sticks, the bettor moves the foot closest to the knife inwards, inch by inch, narrowing the gap; the thrower inches closer to the bettor, and tosses the knife again, until a fail condition happens.
Gnomish Mumblety-Peg adds another condition: throwers must remove the knife from between the bettors’ feet with their teeth.
There were four fail conditions: the knife fails to stick, the bettor “chickens out”, the thrower impales their own foot, one of the players tumbles over during knife retrieval.
Challenger Rockmouse was a good knife thrower, but Fernlodth was her equal, so they would usually go best two out of three; both, however, would get clumsy (alcohol was often involved), blushing and laughing the closer they got to one another.
The cat-faced woman watched with arch amusement, thinking she might have to break out some fresh-baked blueberry muffins before somebody got seriously hurt.
And above the three, in the topmost branches of a thick Norway pine, another cat-face watched, green eyes narrowing, thinking This just may be the final indignity that brings Ferah home again…and sacked!
© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2025)
(To be continued)
Valley of the Trolls 
The game’s not for me, but the muffins are. Can I have one without the other?
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You may have to leg wrestle a giant, first…😉
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ah! takes me back to a certain age… when we were preadolescent and bulletproof
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Well, we thought so…and were usually lucky!
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This series is absolutely Skyrim* material!
* a 2011 action role playing game, one of the best ever published.
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😄😄😄
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Mumblety-Peg + alcohol? Oh, yeah, we need a blueberry muffin intervention pronto! 🤣
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Sounds like a job for the Cafe….Tom?
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The blueberry muffins sound like a great alternative to that game.
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Distraction is the key!
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I love these gnomes and all their shenanigans – gnomes are always up to mischief 😅
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…which often leads to troubles to unravel! 😄
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I am loving this!! So glad that I know that game now.😉
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Surprisingly complex for a knife fight!
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Knives and gnomes may not be a good mix, generally.
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But it’s what they do…sometimes! 😉
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Such a game must be fun, for gnomes. I sounds as if a player is about to be played.
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I have two rather pale and sun-bleached gnomes in my garden (well, of course she does!) who just went a whiter shade of pale after I read them your Six … which, by the way, is just as juicy-delicious as that orange.
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💖😂
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Never a game I believed to have much merit- but I dare say I am interested in who gets stuck first! hehehe
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An interesting little world you’ve created, Bravo! I dare say I wouldn’t want to compete in that game!
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😆 Gnomes like to live on the edge!
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Hahahahahahahaha, too hilarious!!!
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