Albert enjoyed travel. Move 3,000 miles, or ten, and you reached a different place. Well, duh, you might say, but that would be to misunderstand. The places weren’t what Albert craved—palm trees or snow huskies equally a matter of complete indifference. What mattered was the difference—new in a bar where nobody knew his name.
He slid onto the stool in the hotel bar and ordered a sidecar, because that’s what a guy like him drank. The blonde on the next stool eyed him. Tipping his fedora at a rakish angle, he smiled.
“Hiya, little lady.”
“Scram, loser.”
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Memories within memories. Before the war, there was dining and dancing, evenings at the Opera. No, wait—I’m getting confused. The Opera was London—our old life before we took power. But here too we once had parties, I’m sure of that.
Nowadays, there’s politics and war. War is politics conducted by other means, as Clausewitz sort of said. Turns out I’m deliciously good at politics.
Events flap and billow in the gales of history, and we struggle to hold them down.
.Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The witch hunters walk the Earth again, no longer rooting out the devil but hunting the machine. Let’s take an example: Jamir Nazir’s story, The Serpent in the Grove. The story won the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and was then accused of having been written with the help of AI. The author denies this.
Certainly. the prose groans under the weight of metaphor it carries.
Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat. Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”
But is this the mark of the machine or the author’s voice? There’s no way to be sure, but there are known “tells” in AI prose.
• Uniform quality and style, together with repetitive phrases and sentences that are similar in length and structure. Human authors tend to write in “bursts” with varying structure. • Continuity problems. AI may have problems with consistency, Characters, setting, and aplot points may change abruptly. • Lack of emotional depth. AI may struggle with the nuances and quirks of human emotion and expression.
To these I’d add metaphors that sound metaphory but actually make no sense. An example from the story might be “breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.” Sounds good, but what does that actually mean? However, human authors may also create metaphors that misfire.
I ran the story through a couple of AI detectors, and was less than impressed by the result. GPTZero returned a 100% probability that the story was the work of AI. I listed among the most AI sentences these two: “Vishnu was twenty-five wearing the face of fifty” and “No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped”. The first sentence I found to be one of the more powerful metaphors in the piece, The second is ungrammatical but very human to me,
Copyleaks also set the AI probability at 100%. By contrast, EyeSift put the probability that this was AI generated at 39% (no strong AI evidence).
My own feeling is the story is irritatingly elaborate, but also with a simple thread that’s powerful and haunting in a way that could only be written by a human.
It’s hard to remember, but I think it all went tits-up when Grandad took his teeth out. The vicar’s wife shrieked, as if he’d exposed himself, or sunk the gnashers into her ample rump. Grandad, perhaps to be seen to do something, grabbed the picnic hamper and flung it over the railings into the river. The florist swung a punch. Soon, all the wrinklies were one brawling mass.
When the bizzies arrived, they’d surely blame me as the only young ‘un. A pub at the end of the walk sang siren songs of refuge (“Wasn’t there, Guv”). I legged it.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The scribe puts down his stylus and sends the clay tablet for baking. A good day’s recording of the village’s wheat yields, so he allows himself a cup of beer with his dinner.
In the tavern, villagers avoid him. He’s used to that. Scribes are never popular.
Voices at a nearby table rise as the ale flows. “Writing! What’s it good for? Spying on our harvest! And what does that get us?” “Bloody taxes.” “For the bloody king, may Ahura curse him.”
The scribe shivers at the next outburst. “We need to put a stop to all this writing business.”
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Writing seems to have been invented three distinct times. The cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt are well-known, But the third, proto-Elamite from ancient Iran, is shrouded in mystery. One fascinating feature of the Iranian invention is that they gave up writingfor 800 years around 5,000 years ago. We can only speculate why.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Even the walls are vibrating. The very air in my little house pulses. Enough. I have to go next door.
“Would you mind,” I ask, making my smile as friendly as I can manage, “turning the music down a bit?”
He scratches his chin, which he then juts out. “Gotta live our lives, don’t we?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to live it too.”
The door slams.
Six weeks later, there’s a tentative knock on my door. He says, “Locked meself out, haven’t I? Alright if I climb over your wall, mate?”
I sense the prospect of an accommodation.
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.Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Every cell door stands wide. The gaolers dead or fled. The prison is ours, the streets too. Strangers embrace me. We spin and dance to music only we hear— a shared soundless music. We are one. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. I try the words out in my mouth. They’re big and hard to chew as week-old bread.
Bread. This I understand. When we hungered, they said, “Let them eat cake.” What use are they? We can sow and reap. They just dance. Today I learned to dance. We’re coming now, on the road to Versailles, with a terrible joy.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The demonstrator steepled his fingers. “The Belanthropus system allows target acquisition for your preferred weapons platform faster than any human operator.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“In the highly complex kinetics of modern warfare, yes. More targets, more kills.”
The General leaned forward, body tensed like a wolfhound. “With this, we’ll anticipate the enemy’s intentions and neutralise them before they strike. It could make attack unthinkable. We must be first to possess this.”
“General,” I said, “this won’t eliminate war, but automate it and make conflict more likely. We have to ban this.”
That’s how I got command of paperclips.
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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
First, they offered us blooms. That was clever. Just the gift of crimson beauty thrusting through the border. We were charmed and dismissed the scrabbling and bulging on the other side. Seams tore, but so gentle and slow we barely noticed. A little disorder is expected in all things—the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that.
But, behind the blooms, marched serried ranks of thorns. It’s too late 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
The day was hot. I don’t just mean so hot your ice cream melted. This was hell hot; the universe twisting in torment hot; melt your eyeballs hot.
The last of our water was gone a hundred miles back, thinking we’d hit a town, or at least a service station, any time. But the carriageway only went on and on.
Then the world itself buckled, the road ahead wilting.
“This was us,” she said, “We did this,”
“I love you,” I replied.
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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
Neil MacDonald Author 