I admire the blog called Terrible Minds by Chuck Wendig. His advice for writers is pithy, brilliant and rude (really rude – watch out if you don’t like a swearword). This is my entry for one of his flash fiction competitions, written when I should have been doing other things…The challenge was to include one of the following randomly generated sentences: “The borderlands expire thanks to the hundred violins.” “A poetic pattern retains inertia.” and “The criminal disappears after the inventor.” Extra points for using all three.

Summarize this passage in English.

She’s tried everything. Everything. Bribery is no good – all she can offer is an early end to the class, something forbidden by the course director stalking the corridors in silenced footwear. Threats make no impact – they just groan, or don’t understand, or care. Actually taking the damned things out of their hands, which she has resorted to once or twice, results in such a massive collective strop that any sort of co-operation is snuffed out, leaving a roomful of gorgon-glaring teenagers frozen in only-just-contained fury. In revenge they tick the frowny face on the end-of-course feedback form; very bad news to a teacher hoping to keep her job.

The day they market the mobile phone that can be embedded into the body is the day these young people present themselves at the implant clinic. Until then their beloved iPhones must always, always be within reach. Suck it up, Teach (or its equivalent in Mandarin).

It wouldn’t be so bad if the translation software were anything like decent. It’s not. It’s crap. But it’s still a million times easier, in your English lesson, if you’re Chinese and a teenager and you have spent sixteen of the previous 24 hours playing World of Warfare, or whatever, to pick it up, punch in the first Chinese word that comes into your head and write down whatever garbled rubbish the translator offers you.

Factor in misreadings and typing mistakes and you end up with a sentence on climate change in Scotland rendered as “The borderlands expire thanks to the hundred violins.”

They are not just wrong, they are extreme wrong, don’t-know-where-to-start wrong, why-do-we-even-bother wrong, but sometimes, she had to admit, they are oddly haunting: “A poetic pattern retains inertia.” Now and then they even sound like the beginning of a short story,“The criminal disappears after the inventor.”

The teacher sighs and looks out of the window. The instructress respires and defenestrates.