There’s vivid muralling at the entrance, invoking tropical sunshine and hibiscus flowers. But strait is the crude gate and narrow the way. This house promises rapture. This house threatens destruction. Look! Sinister nozzles in the ceiling.

Enter? Run away? Are these the Pearly Gates or the Maw of Hell? Maybe, those are one and the same.

I turn my back and trudge on down the grey streets of Purgatory. Perhaps I have denied myself love; but at least I’ve forestalled eternal torment.

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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

“Third floor, west wing, second window from the right.”

I sighted, zoomed in. “Locked on.”

“You’re authorized to take the shot once you have acquisition.”

The view was grainy. My hands were clammy. Odd, because I never get involved. Perhaps the world-changing magnitude of the target made some nervousness acceptable: the first hit on a target three centuries in the past.

A shape at the window. Smaller than he appeared in his pictures. I squeezed the trigger. Everything changed.

The tau-beam gun hands vanished. The birdsong vanished. The command voice in my earpiece vanished. What had I done?

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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

Where are we supposed to go now?

They came in vast ships, and we said, “Welcome—you must be tired.” We offered food and sweet water. Then they asked for land, only a little bit.

They built and sowed and reaped and showed us map-making. “This bit is yours,” they said, ”and that bit ours.”

“Very good, little brother,” we said.

When they multiplied and demanded more land, we refused, and they rolled a great war machine over us. Our homes burned.

Here, at the edge of the world, we huddle on the sand. Where should we go 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

Mama gaped in horror at the aurochs horns, wider than a man’s stretched arms, and newly plastered-in above the eastern bench. “They’re coming right out of the wall,” she said.

This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. “A good place for Uncle’s trophy, no?”

With a shake of her head, Mama said, “It’s scary—the wild world, punching through the skin of our home.”

Uncle seized up his spear, laughing, and took a defensive stance. “The wild swaddles us, so we can stand strong.”

Mama never cared for the installation, but it remained, and all the neighbours praised the effect.

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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. As a word of explanation, this story takes place in Çatalhöyük, the world’s first city, some nine thousand years ago in stone age Turkey. The novel on which I’m working, People of the Bull, is set there.

My window is my television on the world. Drama, comedy—it has them all. Cheery Emma, resolutely walking the dog that’s her final fraying thread of love. Mr. Michaelson sneaking into the neighbours’ house once her husband has left for work. And my favourite—the Sadie and Dan show, which even has volume. Night before last, he came home drunk, and she’d locked him out. Great Heavens, what a banging and wailing and pleading there was! She opened the upstairs window, shouted, and emptied something over him.

When the thrill of viewing palls, I may turn to poison pen letters.

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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

Some lives in traps and some lives free in wagons. Yeah, you pity me, poor and rough as I be. What you don’t know, my suited-and-booted friend, is I pity you—you’ll be paying-off that debt-trap house until you’re old and joyless. Whenever I tire of the setting, I just hitches up me wagon and moves on.

You calls us tinkers or gyppos, though we’re an ancient people with our own language. We calls you salary men. What really scares you is our freedom: I plays me fiddle at a couple of weddings and earns me the dosh to do as I please all week.

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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 brush in my hand is sure as it makes a thin blue vertical ribbon on the right of the canvas. A river. A dip of the brush into zinc white, for a  hint of water trapped in the ice, creates a larger swathe of frozen badland beside the river. Beside that, a brick-red frontage holding back chaos. And a horizontal blanket of cerulean wraps the whole.

What am I saying? That the universe resolves to a spectrum of neat bands? Will they understand? Does it matter? Yes, I’d like just one person to hear my scream.

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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

Something was wrong. The lamplight in the nook was warm and yellow as freshly churned butter. The grandfather clock allotted time with a reassuring heartbeat. But the world felt awry, dirty.

Then I saw it–the desk covered by packing boxes. Someone had moved into my life.

Angrily, I swept the boxes to the floor. “Whoever you are, get out.”

A voice I did not recognize, full of tenderness and sadness, said, “You don’t know me, do you?”

I spotted no-one and ran through the possibilities: Selective amnesia? Dementia? Trans-dimensional portal?

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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 sky was not particularly blue, nor the grass particularly green. But the barns shone vibrant red, like the houses back home—Dad’s one concession to being foreign. In all other respects, he said, “Now we’re here,  and must fit in.”

I saw the guilt wracking him for the mistake of emigrating, for abandoning the hunt of the cod to push a plough. And I understood his pleasure when I took to reading the Edda.

“It’s good you know who you are,” he said. “The ancestors may have slaughtered folk, but it was always personal, and we composed an ode over their corpses. Here, everything’s about money.”

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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

If you knew what this is, would that make a difference? Let’s say it’s a water scoop for a sauna. Why, then, is it cold enough here to freeze the remaining water? Let’s say glue, instead. Why use such a pretty bucket?

Nothing can be understood without its context, can it, my dear? You are the loveliest woman I ever saw, with a nature as sweet as new-mown summer grass. Why would I kill you? Well, I wouldn’t, of course. And that’s the whole point, really.

Only one more spoonful, my dear, and you can sleep.

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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