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?

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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

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?

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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

Stooping, I examine the flowers. They are like…sea urchins, but growing from green stalks; or a constellation of arcing plasma in solar storms; or cells scurrying about their business in the dark hallways of the body. And, they are like themselves—fractal self-similar images in a hall of mirrors.

I know they bear secrets. What cryptic signatures do they carry of the ailments they cure? Why do these blooms fill me with terror? That too is a signature, and I hurry on.

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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 scratched his head and patted his belly, as if playing that kids’ challenge of combining two different motions. Obviously, he wasn’t convinced, so I redoubled my efforts.

“Some will be saved,” I said.

“Like Noah and the Ark,” I said.

“The waters will recede,” I said, “And the earth will be cleansed.”

“Praise the Lord,” I added.

A long silence followed, in which he shuffled his feet awkwardly. At last he said, “I think Noah had a bigger boat. An inflatable isn’t going to cut 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

I decked him with a single blow.

Of course they arrested me, but there was justification and surely the court will understand. It went down like this:. last year I enrolled in a genetic survey. Dr Franklin told me I carried a hereditary predisposition to obesity, so I joined a gym. Hour after hour of weights. How I hated those workouts!

Today, Franklin revealed it had all been a joke—or, as he put in, I was in the control group that received a fake diagnosis.

Wouldn’t you have decked the bugger?  

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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

“Waiter, there’s a man in my soup.”

I could see him contemplating completing the old comic one-two. Except the man next to me at the counter really was collapsed face down in my plate. The waiter looked around anxiously. Was he worried the goulash caused it, and checking how many patrons had noticed?

I nudged the fellow. “Oi, mate, you okay?”

No response. But he was breathing.

The server brightened—someone else had assumed control. I batted responsibilty back to him and asked, “Can you call an ambulance? And bring another goulash, please.”

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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

There’s a footprint in the rock, and a tingle as I tentatively step my own foot into it. The fit is perfect. A long stride, and then another—this person was running. Towards something, or away? In hope or in fear? I’ll never know. Their tracks are here, fossilized across millennia, but the emotions have dispersed in a puff of chemical breeze.

“Ben,” I say, wanting to share this ache of ignorance with him. And then I stop, looking at him in a piercing moment of loneliness. I have no clue what this living, breathing man is feeling either.

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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

Someone went to considerable trouble to build this. It had a purpose. There are projecting shelves, enclosed areas, and a solid base. Was trade transacted here? Perhaps this was a wet market, or maybe citizens shared beverages and faced each other across gaming boards.

Without knowing what these creatures looked like, it’s hard to guess. Assuming they sat at these shelves, they may have been a little under three metres tall. Why no skeletons, not even a scrap of clothing (if they wore clothes)?

Where did they all go? What might this lever do if I…….

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

Not so bleeding clever now, are you with your big house up on the hill? Well, it’s falling down, innit? Ooh, you have had the cowboys in. Can’t get the workmanship these days.

You thought you’d just build that sodding castle up there where you could look down and intimidate us. Who’s looking down now? Sod off back to France, you Norman gits. And take them Romans with you. England for the Anglo-Saxons, yeah.

Come to think of it, take your Angles and your Saxons too. Britain for the Celts, I say. Not so bleeding clever now, are 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

There were lives here once. If you listen, you can still hear the honkytonk with its out-of-tune F sharp. If you look, you may half-glimpse the flounced skirt of a bar girl.

A house, sure—a house can disappear. Fires catch easy, and carpenter ants will gnaw through a building in days. Even whole streets vanished in the war. But towns, towns shouldn’t just blink out.

I turn to Tommy. He’s long gone too, of course. “The main street were right here, weren’t it, mate?”

And he shakes his head and says, “Till the seam ran out.”

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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