Yeah, I wasn’t surprised when they came. The truth is out there, you know. No, no. Don’t stand directly underneath – they can beam you up that way.

What do you mean they’re lamps? Don’t you get it? That’s what they want us to think. Well, if you’re so smart tell me what the message means.

The message for crissakes, the one they’re projecting on the window. Look, one bar, then two, then three. Arithmetic, right? But look at the first one. That, my friend, is their encyclopaedia, their gift, if you know how to read 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

The meeting broke up early. You’d think it would take days to reach such a decision, but only fifty-three minutes had passed, I walked with the President in the gardens. On the lawn a peacock called, the sound rasping and full of anguish.

“All of them?” I said. “Must they all die?”

The President brushed hair from her eyes. It was a weary gesture. “You know the answer. If even one survives, this will get out.”

Beyond the walls, I heard the rumble as the tanks moved off.

 

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 called them the witch’s tits. On account of their shape, you know – sharp cones. Before we named the peaks, this was just an ordinary mountain track. Afterwards, well you could feel it, the cold I mean, a kind of chill in your heart as you rounded the corner.

I think it was Harry who named the force – Ishtar, an ancient Queen of Heaven, who destroyed her lovers. Anyhow it was Henry She took for her own that day. We heard a wail and he vanished. That’s why we made the warning sign. Nobody takes this road 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

When the lights arrived, Michael wasn’t there to see them. The radiance danced, coruscated, the night sky was incandescent. Reflections glimmered on the unblinking eye of Michael’s camera lens. No shutter click caught the secret for posterity.

Under the trees, Michael indulged a secret of his own, more furtive, less cosmic. He closed his eyes and shuddered. “Yes, yes. Don’t stop”

 

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

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