Friday Fictioneers – Baking

~ neilmacdon
PHOTO PROMPT © Jennifer Pendergast

The past occupies my present. I make tea, bake biscuits, cut the grass. The change is too vast to comprehend.

I take the garbage out, go to the shops, do the laundry. The machine runs out of control and the engineers panic. Old gods shake their shaggy heads and snuffle in the underbrush.

When it’s all over, when today has become yesterday: maybe, then, we’ll be able to tell what it meant.

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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

60 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Baking”

  1. At least the last year as inspired an upsurge in home baking. We’ll never be short of a good cake or bread in the future. It will be a long time before the dust has settled on the ramifications of it all.

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  10. Those old gods snuffling in the underbrush caught my attention! I couldn’t decide if this was a recently widowed man, a retired man, a man out of work due to Covid? In any case, he’s learning to live a different sort of life, for sure. One he may never really understand.

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  15. One day clever people will write the pattern that became a crisis so that other people can understand it. Meanwhile, I’m happy to bake biscuits. I loved the snuffling gods – I have an idea they’re little mammals and will be here long after humans have progressed themselves to death.

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  19. I like the contrast between the opening — the mundane, the routine, the “grounding” in normal and then a morphing into some surreal movie/dream where shaggy old gods shake heads while the engineers totally freak out. Reminded me of Fritz Lang’s incredible 1927 Metropolis.

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  21. Very profound and a fitting story for our times. Unwanted change is everywhere and things don’t get better. Those old gods needn’t hide, the new ones are even worse.

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  23. A fine summary of today’s life.

    What irks me, learning there are risk assessment departments in Gov who study these events and have failed to prepare or else never understood the danger.

    This is not a new event, even in our lifetime, I remember SARs 2003 and the scare that rippled around for a while.

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  28. Any story that includes: “Old gods shake their shaggy heads and snuffle in the underbrush” is a winner in my opinion. I have to presume that the machine out of control is much bigger than all of us, as many things are. And too we will only understand the consequences when the dust has settled. Thought-provoking as always.

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