Friday Fictioneers – Meany, meany, tickle a parson

~ neilmacdon
PHOTO PROMPT © Susan Rouchard

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

49 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Meany, meany, tickle a parson”

  13. Oh I love all those ‘tomes’ spread everywhere, taking root, compacting and ‘creating new meaning’. Such fecundity! But I guess all that meaning didn’t help the missing scholar. Seems he had a different lesson to learn. Wonderful story.

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  22. The saying was different to the one I’ve known since a child (without knowing what it meant) which was Mene Menel Tekel Peres which I seem to recall seeing above the Cross. I couldn’t find a translation of that (except in Italian, which is not my forte) so I looked up what you had written. This is a good piece, Neil.

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