Is it now, now? No, it was now, then. When am I? Who am I? Is this a dagger I see before me?

Metal shaped with a thin, sharp edge. Could be a dagger, yes. So, imagining the past formation from a hot ingot, I glimpse its future plunge into the body of the old king.

Past and future, I shape both in my swirling now. If I imagine differently, I create different pasts, different futures. I invent the world.

But this is terror. What stops everything collapsing into moosh?

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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 sea hisses; the boom yanks against my grip, but I stay sheeted-in; the board rises, planning over the water. Exhilaration!

I sheet-in harder to carve-gybe as Rags taught us. The speed’s crazy. I hear Rags’ Scottish lilt, “At this point yer brain’ll be screaming, ‘No, no, I’m going tae die. But don’t listen to yer brain. Listen to meee.’”

Panic.

I finish in the water under the sail. Gripping the boom, I push up.

The wind catches the sail, pulling me back onto the board. Ecstasy! I may not have mastered carve-gybing, but I’ve discovered how to water-start.

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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

For forty years it sat atop the chestnut wardrobe. She forbade us to look inside.

“My crown’s in there,” she always said. “The only thing I saved when we fled Russia,”

Now she’s gone. My brother and I open the hatbox. No crown. Just a brittle, folded paper. One line only, in her looping script. “Ha! Fooled you.”

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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

“You knitted that?”

“I did. Lovely, no?”

“A spiderweb. From wool?”

“Of course. Only the finest cashmere.”

“But why? What do you hope to catch?”

“Caught you, didn’t it?”

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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

“ … wont’ do it.”

Well, that’s definitive, and now I face a choice. I can meet immovable objection with irresistible force or capitulate and seek a way round. Cogs grind and wheels spin as I imagine the possible outcomes. Force is all or nothing—if he doesn’t cave in to counter-pressure, all that remains is to walk away. Capitulation allows evasion and new attempts. The choice seems obvious.

As I open my mouth in reply, it feels clogged with a chewy, bitter substance. Words form as if from nothing.

“Well, fuck you.”

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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

“But no, sir. How could you think so?”

“Don’t you see? The magenta tones, the swirling brush strokes, signify a tempestuous dawn approaching. Surely.”

“Those are not swirling brush strokes. That, my good sir, is scrumbling. You mistake the artist’s technique as you do his meaning. The painting shows aurora.”

“There are none so blind as those who will not see. It is dawn, I tell you, a terrible dawn.”

“Aurora.”

“Nonsense.”

“How dare you! I will have satisfaction, sir. Pistols at aurora.”

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Aurora is a Latin for dawn, and scumbling is a brush technique of applying paint in a circular motion

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 woke with the most intense craving for cheese. As luck would have it, the fridge had registered there was only a hardening heel of Stilton left and ordered a divine selection. The Sainsbury’s drone dropped it off as I punched for an espresso on the auto-chef.

As I nibbled on the edge of an oatcake brimming with rich and creamy brie, wisps of my dream came back. Cheese. The theme had been cheese. Possibly, I’d been a mouse.

What didn’t come back was the advertiser’s message I later found embedded in my dream-maker. ”Lovely creamy brie.”

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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

In the beginning, the elders say, formless chaos lay upon the face of the universe, roiling and spitting. Now I see strings of galaxies arcing across the void as gas clouds collapse under their own weight—stardust. As the inchoate future becomes past, matter condenses into pattern.

Time, that’s the remedy. It’s time which gives form and certainty to possibility.

Some of the matter swims, then sits up and crawls—the secret at the heart of the bud—slow and always straining back towards the stars.

Will we get there? Only the moving finger of time knows.

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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 diner’s unremarkable. Could be anywhere, and almost anywhen. But Shelly, she is remarkable—tough, with a head of hair like springs and a tongue like a buzz-saw. I’ve had a thing for Shelly for near on thirty years.

“You can get anything you want in Alice’s Restaurant, exceptin’ Alice,” as the song goes. That’s Shelly’s. I turned up once with a mariachi band and a convertible full of red roses, like that Richard Gere movie. Woman only sniffed and muttered, “damn fool boy.”

Suppose you might call me a stalker, except the relentless pursuit really tickles Shelly. One day she’ll succumb.

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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

Others have walked this way before me, down the long processional. From the Land of the Living to the Land of the Dead we come, torches bright in the last curtain of the night. Happiness, awe, and fear walk with me, but I am one of a host, and the druids shield us as we enter the great circle.

The solstice sun stabs out through the dark and brushes a finger to the guide stone. A terrible brightness. I cannot look as the year is reborn.

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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