The way up is arduous. The path is steep, forcing me to scramble over jagged rocks and traverse sheer drops clinging by fingernails. But more—entering forbidden space, the realm of the gods, is terrifying.

Looking down, I glimse hunters raying out across the plain, and then only the circle of the village. Finally, everything to do with people is erased, leaving only the great curve of mother river and the land stepping away to forest.

The air is thin at the summit, and I gasp. There are no gods here. They were easier to see from far below.

.

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

Just off the path, in the underbrush, two small faces stared out at me—a paired deity, carved in springstone. I had to be close! Kneeling, I caressed the effigy, the rock cool in the morning air and smoothed by the careful intricacy of the sculptor’s art. A tiny breeze lifted my hair and kissed my brow.

Up and up, through the trees I sprang towards the hilltop village. Would they know me here? By the first hut, a carved ancestor with the head of a bird nodded gravely to me. A small child examined me and ran screaming.

 .

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

Behind the door, someone stands. He doesn’t mean me well, but I need him. When he abandons me, the crust of the world becomes paper thin, and I fall. The fall never stops. You can get used to falling. It’s simple really: just believe you are static and the world is moving upwards. There’s a kind of peace in that. But the certainty of the man’s embrace is better. Though his talons sink into my flesh, at least I know where I am.

.

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

PHOTO PROMPT © Brenda Cox

It was a sign, of course—an old French movie spliced into my street. But what did it mean?

Marie said it was just a green Citroen 2-CV, but Marie sees no meaning in the pattern of clouds either.

Faintly, I heard hooves and a voice chanting. “Any old iron. Any old iron.” Another intrusion.

I rushed to the kitchen and poured myself a medicinal brandy, terrified by the faint cry from the street “Up she goes.” When I returned, the 2-CV had vanished and our street returned to normal.

Marie didn’t think this spooky. “They probably went to work.”

.

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 a man walking the damp strand. I can just make him out in the distance. He lunges strangely. Is he drunk? No, at last the meaning comes into focus. He’s tossing his cap in the air and catching it again. The wind is taking the cap, fluttering like a freed bird above him, and he’s forced to stagger forward to catch the toy before it lands on the wet sand. The repeated action has a jauntiness. Once, twice, three times, he tosses the hat and catches it joyfully. At last, he tires of the game and walks on, disappearing around the headland.

.

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 mists part, and there she is—Loab. A creature from our nightmares, red of cheek with sunken eyes. Where did she spring from? Has she always existed in the jumble of our subconscious, revealed now by artificial intelligence? Or is she a cryptid, summoned into existence by the yearning of the machine?

“Mother?” I croon softly to her and caress the screen.

.

For more on Loab, the bizarre old woman image created by AI see

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

“Why are the houses on stilts?” I asked.

“Rains a lot here,” my guide replied. “The stilts raise us above the water level,”

Though I thought this was really clever, I wondered why they didn’t just make the houses float.

“They’d drift away,” she said.

“Would that be so bad? You could travel without leaving home., take your home with you,”

“What a lovely idea.”

For a year I didn’t return. When I did, the stilts were gone and a cloud of houses drifted serenely across the sky under multi-coloured balloons.

.

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

Bombs will fall. Some will die. Perhaps twenty. With 150,000 people in the city, my chances are good. But, of course, I put myself in harm’s way, travelling to the front-line and courting danger.  So, my risk is, let’s say, one in 50,000.  I do, I thrive on danger. There’s a rush to it, when you feel the wind from the angel’s wings on your cheek. When you turn your cape and the horns stab empty air. Some might say I’m a conflict junkie. That addiction perhaps reduces my odds to one in 10,000. Some will die. But not me.

.

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 world laminates into four: my warm candle-lit table; a receding hall of empty places; beyond the window, the eaves of strangely pitched roofs that do not belong in this place; and, finally, a lowering sky, purple with distant menace. There are no people. Anywhere.

I wait.

The message arrives, as I knew it would, a blur of white slicing the air like an assassin’s blade—”Do it.”

With trembling fingers, I unwrap the package. They will understand. Won’t they?

.

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

Umm. There’s been a little bit of an accident. Not my fault, you understand. You know I was supposed to charge up the batteries on the space station with the ground-to-space laser beam? Well, there was a bit of glitch. Long story short, the space station’s gone, vaporised. But on the plus side, I think I know what caused it, so we can recalibrate the beam. These things happen, okay?

.

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