They cut the head off to make her fit. My fridge is small.
For six days, grief ravaged me. On the seventh, I grabbed my Desert Tech MDR and fitted the clip. In my head, music played. I knew this story. I was this story.
There would be blood. There would be vengeance for my wounded masculinity. There would be congratulations.
But reality’s not like that. The black dude dies first. Do it by the book: the book of law, not the fictional one.
I wish I’d known Mary better before they killed her.
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 not here now. I serve the future. We are making memories. One day, Mary, we’ll look back and see how happy we were today: the freedom of the open road in our campervan; the exotic food we ate; the carefree way we ran into the breakers and embraced.
Such memories!
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
Do you enjoy cracking codes? I’ve been fascinated by codes and ciphers since I was a kid. Now, I have the chance to include a cipher in the novel I’m working on, Boundarising. Here it is:
Can you crack this? This isn’t just an empty challenge. I need to be able to demonstrate that a teenage boy, armed only with paper and pencil could do it, so I really need to know how easy this is to solve.
My protagonist, Sol, has been dispatched by his parents to live during wartime with his uncle, Zand in the countryside where he should be safe from enemy bombing, Many children were sent out of danger in this way in Britain during the second world war.
Just before he gets on the train, Sol’s father, William, presses an envelope into his hands and asks him to give it to Zand.
But Sol is a curious boy, opens the envelope and discovers the coded message. He spend many months trying to crack it. To give you a running start, Sol, recognizes that because there are no numbers greater than five, this code is probably created in a 5×5 grid. This would be sufficient to store all the letters of the alphabet, if two (such as I and J) are doubled up.
1
2
3
4
5
1
A
B
C
D
E
2
F
G
H
I/J
K
3
L
M
N
O
P
4
Q
R
S
T
U
5
V
W
X
Y
Z
So, Sol reasons that the numbers code for letters (where 11 is A, 12 is B and so on). But, there are groups of four numbers, while two would be sufficient to code for a letter. So, Sol thinks the code involves pairs of letters. There must be some coding rules for relating the members of the pair to each other.
He readily sees that the grid above doesn’t decode the message, so he decides the letters cannot be arranged simply from A to Z. He thinks it’s unlikely the arrangement is random. That’s as far as he gets for some time.
Can you break the code? If so, please let me know how you did it. The first reader to do so will get a free copy of the book when it’s published.
You’re right, of course. I should have seen the tree. But I didn’t. Not with him here, in our restaurant, and at my table. Imagine. My hands shook as I took his order. He chose chilli. Not pâté de foie gras, not lobster and truffle sauce, not ambrosia and nectar. Chilli, and a small beer. Like a regular person. It was uplifting. Heavenly choirs sang. Gentle waves caressed the shore.
What do you mean, there’s nobody at the table? Fair enough, I missed the tree. But, really, you can’t see him? Seems we all have our areas of blindness.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fieldsto write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I’m a hero, me. They oughta give me a bleedin’ medal for what I done, mate; saved the country, din’t I? Sat on me arse for fourteen months, never going out, never letting any bugger in; it was hard, I can tell you; but I stuck it out, ‘cause that’s what an Englishman does.
Fourteen months! That was my war. Double vaccinated, I am. Stopped the virus in its tracks, so we did. So where’s me bleedin’ medal now, and me war pension from a grateful nation?
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
Phineas crossed his arms. He didn’t look convinced. This one was slipping away from me.
I made my mouth smile. “Your decision, man. Of course it is. Sure. Turn your back on the future. Perhaps, I’ll offer it to your neighbours. They seem like forward-looking folk.”
For the first time, he looked unsure. I pressed my advantage. “A home nuclear reactor isn’t for everyone. Free power for life—that could be too much responsibility.”
The big play now. Turning, I headed across the road to number 10.
“Wait,” Phineas called.
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
That really shouldn’t be there, you know. A place for everything and everything in its place—that’s what my mother used to say, and that’s how it is in our house. I mean, what were you thinking? Foot slipped? I’ll give you foot slipped, laddie. Look at the thing. It’s just wrong. Against natural order, against God’s Law. Gives me the heeby-jeebies. Sort it, before you get the back of my hand.
The anthropologist, Mary Douglas, defined pollution as matter out of place. 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
She said “We are the stewards of the very last traces of humanity’s carbon budget. We’re making the sky that we live under, and that our descendants will live under for many generations.”
And I felt a lump in my throat. More than the wildfires in Australia, more than the disappearance of the turtle doves, and more than the rain that falls and falls; this scared me. I’ve found the fear. Now we need to forge the hope. What we do next matters.
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
Build a house for god-botherers, would ye? Next to my sheep? I don’t think so. We keep to the old gods here, not yer man on a tree. Aye, I wiss that the King, gods rot him, protects ye. But we’ll show ye.
We dug for three months on the hill above yer kirk. Filled-in the pits with chalk. And tonight we took the grass covers off. When ye awake from yer monkish cells on the morrow, ye’ll see it right enough. A giant man, with a giant cock, waving down at you, all day, every day. Be gone.
The Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset, England, has been dated to around 1000 years old, carved into the hill above an old monastery.
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
We’ve all heard about stories within stories. But how about stories without (in the sense of outside) stories? I was prompted to consider this when I looked through the reviews of my novel, The Tears of Boabdil. On the surface, this is a story of an undercover cop, Vince, attempting to penetrate a suspected jihadi cell, and manipulating a target into a sexual relationship. It works as a thriller and as an (abusive) romance. And I wrote it so that it could be read that way. What struck me was that the majority of my reviewers gave it this reading.
There is also another possible reading: namely, that the thriller is simply a container for an exploration of what we mean by truth and lies.
The novel suggests that everything Vince believes he knows, including himself, is a story. The cop lives-out a cover-story. As his sanity fractures, the rules of his story world begin to permeate his real world. And that was what I was what really interested me in writing it. There are many clues and motifs that lead the reader to this question. But the narrative about truth, lies and stories isn’t told directly—it’s a conclusion the reader has to assemble in their own minds. I believe that reading is an active process involving both the reader and the writer, rather than the passive consumption of a story.
Beyond these two layers of the narrative, there are probably others, partially hidden to me, at least when I was writing it.
There’s a moral conclusion. Vince pays a price, a terrible price, for his deception. And his lover’s/victim’s life is devastated. No work of fiction can escape this moral (or ideological, if you will) dimension. Every story is built on a framework of beliefs about right and wrong. In comedy, the story is driven by characters mistaking each other’s intentions. In tragedy, characters struggle unsuccessfully against wickedness or with flaws in their own nature.
Perhaps there’s another layer, too. In rendering Vince’s mental collapse, I drew on mythology. He is increasingly beset by figures who represent his mother and his father.
The mother manifests as Ishtar, a Mesopotamian goddess, and the father as Malachi, who shares much in common with the ancient hero, Gilgamesh. These may not be simply decorative flourishes added by the author. I may be telling myself something about myself. I say this because I have again turned to mythology to render a major character in the novel I’m working on now. Mythological reference is powerful, not least because it imports through recognizable characters a cargo of other narratives. Perhaps I am drawn to the liminal deities of mythology because they allow me to say something about transgression across the borders between good and evil. Perhaps, I am exploring the idea that goodness is not quite as good as we like to believe, and evil not quite as evil. It is probably no accident that the other mythological character in The Tears of Boabdil is a trickster figure that often manifests as a crow. The lover/victim at one point says “Goodness is a solid whereas evil is a liquid. You need a little evil in you to weather the edges off the goodness, otherwise it cuts the heart.”
So, yes, stories carry fragments of other stories, other meanings, that invite the reader to put the pieces together in new patterns.
Neil MacDonald Author 