Mr. Tankerness owned a tree. The tree had a tiny door at the base. The tiny door was a trap. Of course, my parents warned me against men like Mr. Tankerness. The cute hobbit tree drew children in to capture them.  

I considered chopping the tree down, but that would take hours and he’d hear me and come running. Only one answer worked.

So why was everyone so upset at me for burning Mr. Tankerness’ house down? They should have given me a medal.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

I lurk behind a tall stand of ostrich feathers.

You may wonder why. Perhaps I’m a secret agent waiting for my handler, so I can pass on the microfilm. Perhaps I’m a lovelorn stalker, unable to approach my target and sniffing her scent from the other side of the stand.

The truth, as always, is less dramatic. Actually, I’m trying to avoid the inevitable conversation with Stanley, should he see me, about the unpaid dues for the bowls club.

Still, a guy can dream, no?

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

There were books everywhere—teetering stacks on tables, and dense undergrowth carpeting the floors. The first tendrils already tentatively explored the stair treads to the upper floor. This man was a scholar, for sure. But where could he be?

“Hello?” I called, hacking a path.

Paragraphs and treatises fell to my machete. And then I noticed a bizarre thing—at the dense bottom of the stacks, compaction had occurred, driving the tomes into each other, melding and creating new meaning.

Writing appeared on the wall. “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”

Now I understood where the scholar had gone.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Where the two worlds meet, there is a line—almost imperceptible and thin as a fly’s whisker. Our world is softly rounded; their world is sharp and angular, but they have colour, where ours has none.

Maybe, and I believe this, if you achieve an immaculate slimness and then jump, you can enter, not the sharp world, but the line. Hurl yourself forward at the exact moment of crossing, and you travel that line forever. That is what I believe.

After months of fasting, I am ready. I step off the bridge.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here  

There’s vivid muralling at the entrance, invoking tropical sunshine and hibiscus flowers. But strait is the crude gate and narrow the way. This house promises rapture. This house threatens destruction. Look! Sinister nozzles in the ceiling.

Enter? Run away? Are these the Pearly Gates or the Maw of Hell? Maybe, those are one and the same.

I turn my back and trudge on down the grey streets of Purgatory. Perhaps I have denied myself love; but at least I’ve forestalled eternal torment.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

“Third floor, west wing, second window from the right.”

I sighted, zoomed in. “Locked on.”

“You’re authorized to take the shot once you have acquisition.”

The view was grainy. My hands were clammy. Odd, because I never get involved. Perhaps the world-changing magnitude of the target made some nervousness acceptable: the first hit on a target three centuries in the past.

A shape at the window. Smaller than he appeared in his pictures. I squeezed the trigger. Everything changed.

The tau-beam gun hands vanished. The birdsong vanished. The command voice in my earpiece vanished. What had I done?

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Where are we supposed to go now?

They came in vast ships, and we said, “Welcome—you must be tired.” We offered food and sweet water. Then they asked for land, only a little bit.

They built and sowed and reaped and showed us map-making. “This bit is yours,” they said, ”and that bit ours.”

“Very good, little brother,” we said.

When they multiplied and demanded more land, we refused, and they rolled a great war machine over us. Our homes burned.

Here, at the edge of the world, we huddle on the sand. Where should we go now?

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Mama gaped in horror at the aurochs horns, wider than a man’s stretched arms, and newly plastered-in above the eastern bench. “They’re coming right out of the wall,” she said.

This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. “A good place for Uncle’s trophy, no?”

With a shake of her head, Mama said, “It’s scary—the wild world, punching through the skin of our home.”

Uncle seized up his spear, laughing, and took a defensive stance. “The wild swaddles us, so we can stand strong.”

Mama never cared for the installation, but it remained, and all the neighbours praised the effect.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here. As a word of explanation, this story takes place in Çatalhöyük, the world’s first city, some nine thousand years ago in stone age Turkey. The novel on which I’m working, People of the Bull, is set there.

My window is my television on the world. Drama, comedy—it has them all. Cheery Emma, resolutely walking the dog that’s her final fraying thread of love. Mr. Michaelson sneaking into the neighbours’ house once her husband has left for work. And my favourite—the Sadie and Dan show, which even has volume. Night before last, he came home drunk, and she’d locked him out. Great Heavens, what a banging and wailing and pleading there was! She opened the upstairs window, shouted, and emptied something over him.

When the thrill of viewing palls, I may turn to poison pen letters.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Some lives in traps and some lives free in wagons. Yeah, you pity me, poor and rough as I be. What you don’t know, my suited-and-booted friend, is I pity you—you’ll be paying-off that debt-trap house until you’re old and joyless. Whenever I tire of the setting, I just hitches up me wagon and moves on.

You calls us tinkers or gyppos, though we’re an ancient people with our own language. We calls you salary men. What really scares you is our freedom: I plays me fiddle at a couple of weddings and earns me the dosh to do as I please all week.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here