Every now and again, you get a glimpse into how the illusion is achieved. When the light falls just so, when the air holds a tinny reverberation, you can spot the apparition and hear the clanking of great gears. For a while, for a lifetime, for an epoch, the set captivates us. But then we see the flats vibrate and the backdrop flutter. In a moment, it will all be different, the prince will kiss the sleeping beauty, and the world will wake into a new story,

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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 Duke was a cunning man. He’d always say, “If a lord has a strong castle and many loyal soldiers, he’s in trouble.”

“Why is that?” I once asked.

“Because it means he must also have many enemies.”

The man built his place simply, with a covering of wattle and daub over hewn stone and stout mortar. “A place, not a palace,” he’d say with a snigger.

Nobody bothered him. Nobody came to pillage his glittering staterooms and dancing fountains.

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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

He folds his arms, head tilted upwards towards a future only he sees. “The AI maps a pattern in genetic adaptation which we can direct. Why care what it’s made of? What’s important is what it does.”

Of course, I’ll lose, but I fight my corner. “Perhaps if we understood every tiny detail, this might not matter. But the flap of butterfly wings in the Amazon may cause Kansas tornados.”

He smiles that insufferable smile. “So you say, but really you’re invoking the soul. Almost none of the atoms from birth survive, but I’m still me. We’re safe to proceed.”

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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 criticism came out of the blue. “You might at least try to respect my culture, instead of being so sure yours is right.”

And, of course, I came back fighting. “Taking shoes off inside a house is polite? Yeah, there’s nothing as courteous as stinky socks.”

The way we separate the dirty from the clean orders our universe and reflects our anxieties.

“Perhaps you could wash your feet,” she suggested quietly.

Suddenly I knew I loved her.

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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

I hated her instantly and passionately. Twisting my face into a smile, I asked, “And your work represents?”

“The piece says Mother Nature will prevail”. Her smug voice flowed like molasses.

God, why had I ever agreed to judge the competition? Not only did I hate her, I despised every sentimental bone in her body.

“In that case, would a better not have been,” I suggested, “filling the engine compartment with earth as a planter? The pots kinda give the trick away.”

That was when she stabbed me with the trowel.

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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

I climb painfully down into the trench, gripping the ladder—aware my back is twinging, aware I have only a couple more seasons. The new ones chatter like baby birds in a nest. Once, I too had their brash certainty. Breath rattles in the ribcage of my mortality.

The crown of a skull peeps out from the dirt, and the young ones crowd around, waiting. The skull shows signs of decorative plaster tinted with red ochre.

What thoughts and feelings animated this cranium? Why the ceremonial treatment? We will never know, and I am filled with despair.

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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

Between the thought and the action falls the shadow. Between the wild and the built rises the fence. I have made walls, robust, secure structures, separating subject and object, good and evil. They say good fences, good neighbours make: this is mine, and that is yours. But here is a branch, heavy with fruit, that penetrates and overhangs my stern, geometrical garden. If I tend the pleading limb, keep it free of scab and canker, surely the apples are mine when they fall. How I yearn for this creeping emissary from the outside world!

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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

Up these winding stairs, there is a man who turns water into wine; a woman who knows all one- hundred-and-sixty-thousand names of the common moths; students poring over Hittite grammars. In these dingy little rooms, live endless ghosts of scholars and sages.

We do not know each other, and yet all of us are drawn here, funnelling silently together through the narrow passageway. All of us seek answers to our different torments.

A man in a black robe stands immobile in the courtyard. He speaks. “Go. Answers are cheap—It’s good questions that are hard to find,”

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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

I am so tired. Here, maybe there will be safe haven. Surely, when I tell my story, they’ll offer rest, give me a cup of rewarmed stew, bathe and dress my wounds. There are good people too in this world.

But the stone wall terrifies me–it has his implacable hardness. And now, that lamp I thought so welcoming, shines with the easy radiance he first used to charm me.

A shadow falls across the entrance, an arm outstretched. I turn and stumble on into the night.

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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

Triumphantly, he straddled the boundary, one foot crunched into the snow, the other warming in hot sand.

They’d told him it was impossible: you had to wait for summer to come, they said—you couldn’t go to it. With mocking earnestness, he had explained that, of course, you could. All it took was a plane ticket. He’d known what they meant. And now he’d proved that, as Einstein taught, time is only another place.

Hopping across the frontier, he narrowly avoided being cannoned into by a boy chasing a volleyball. The lad looked familiar, just like Grandad in childhood photos.

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The grandfather paradox is a well-known refutation of the possibility of time travel. If you travel back in time and accidentally kill your grandfather, then you can never have been born to travel back in time. 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