Perhaps it was because his parents called him Darius. Bearing the name of an ancient conqueror carries its own risks. At all events, Darry played a long game only he understood.

“Who does it harm?” he’d say when we questioned his project. For 25 years he quarried and shaped, assembled and carved. In secret, he overwrote the landscape of his extensive estates with temples and amphitheatres, statuary and canals.

“Darry,” I said to him one day, “this is a Disneyworld, a fantasy.”

“Now.” He nodded. “Sure. But in a thousand years, who’ll be certain?”

Darius was inventing a legend.

 

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.

 

It took the rescuers a month to dig their way to the mountain cabins through snowdrifts a metre high. Dagmar’s was the last they reached.

“Don’t reckon it’ll be pretty,” Sergeant Rasmussen warned the volunteers. That morning they’d found Sven and Inga’s frozen bodies wrapped together in a final embrace, each of the children neat and cold in their beds. All the children bar two. The dog had eaten them.

They forced their way into Dagmar’s house, crunching over the litter of small bones. The cleaver caught Rasmussen in the neck.

“Food,” the old lady croaked in relief.

 

 

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

Albert liked collecting. As a child it was stamps, as a young man, girlfriends. Nowadays, slackened by sin and faltering vitality, he became a lepidopterist.  Five hundred glass cases, each packed with exotic chevrons of inert delight.

These delicate angels, dancing on the skewer of a pin, weren’t arranged as you might expect – blues in one case, swallowtails in another, metalmarks, and so on.  Instead, Albert displayed them by markings, arranged side by side so the patterns spelled out words.

“The way we categorise things,” he said, “confronts us with our assumptions. To me, nature is a book.”

 

 

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

 

Everything emits time, not only people. That’s what Elmer told me. He says it’s just that some time is so slow we can’t perceive it, like India rumpling Asia as it smashes in. And some is too fast, like a neutrino.

And then I spot one – a neutrino – spearing into the snow by the streetlamp, a microscopic meteorite which buries itself with a hiss and a breath of ozone.

“I see time. Deep time, wept by a neutron star.” I run forward.

The plates of past and future slide past each other. I look away, and the long instant collapses.

 

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

It was Henry’s name on the hotel. But, really, Alice ran things. She ploughed every cent back into the business, adding a second floor and then a penthouse. The building looked like a crazy pile of discarded banana boxes.

Alice found Henry lying in the shade of an upturned boat, roughing out a calypso.  “Up, man,” she said. “There’s work to do.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“To earn more money.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“So we can employ more people and take it easy.”

“What do you think I’m doing now?”

 

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

Arcu’tep didn’t need to go. He could have stayed in his kraal, tending his herd. But all the folk from the valley had volunteered.

“Come on, it’ll be fun. Drinking, feasting, and lots of rumpy-pumpy,” Senae’tep cajoled.

Arcu’tep shrugged. “Yeah, there’s nothing as fun as hefting buckets of earth all day and dumping them on a big mound,”

“You’re missing the point,” Senae’tep said. “It’s not about what we build, but that we work together, mountain folk and plains people.”

He went, and all summer the stockade rose. Then they feasted and burned everything to the ground. Arcu’tep brought home a mountain woman.

 

Sorry, I couldn’t quite get this down to 100 words. 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

Molly’s house had many rooms, and you got the room Molly thought you deserved. Also, it has to be said, the room you could afford.

If you were specially favoured, she invited you into the grand salon with its sweeping staircase and chandeliers. Waiters circulated with flutes of champagne. And the ladies and gentlemen whirled in the dance.

I know because I peeped through the window once, but was never invited in. In the east wing where I had my dank room, snipers hunkered behind crumbling walls, and tanks rumbled through the corridors.

 

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

Henry’s life was dominated by a sudden whim that had crossed his mind age 14. In 1965 he conceived the dream of becoming the centre of his own planetary system with tiny objects orbiting him.

A single hydrogen atom would do! But Henry needed to isolate himself from everything perturbing his gravity. He eschewed friends and moved to a tent in the woods, but still the earth’s mass tugged at the nearby stuff.

Last Friday, he hurled himself in free-fall from the cliff, releasing a nail clipping. As he dropped, he calculated the clipping would take 21 hours to circumnavigate him.

 

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 was a white thing on the surface in front of him. Its outside tapered at the bottom and was open at the top.

“Hat,” he said. The word meant something, but he couldn’t remember what.

The woman handed him the thing. “Drink,” she said.

Actions he understood, and he drank. But the names of things swirled around him like a flock of flying things, and he couldn’t restore any to the places where it should roost.

He knew he loved the woman, but couldn’t remember what to call her.

“Knife,” he said.

 

 

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.

 

“A whole month vanished,” Penny said.

January always came as a jarring surprise. The year ahead was shaped like a horseshoe, anchored to her forehead at 1 January and to her midriff by 31 December.

Penny was a synaesthete – she could see time. On any day of the year, the date was there, projecting from her body. Until she mentioned it to friends, she hadn’t known she was unusual.

But there was an abrupt jump at year-end from one prong of the horseshoe to the other. “There’s a gap,” she told me, “like something was there and I missed it.”

 

 

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