There’s an image of the Virgin Mary in my toast, picked out in darker browning. There is, really! I knew yesterday something special was going to happen when I saw that starling with the one milky eye.
On the bird’s sighted side there were empty plastic bags, daily commutes and nastygrams. But on the other side! Oh! On the other side, jewelled castles, miracles and daring quests.
And now, here in my breakfast, the annunciation of my very own miracle. I kneel, head bowed, and pray – for peace, healing and for Tara in Accounts to notice me.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on reveals,.
I don’t exist. The track unravels empty across the moor – the physical world contains no first person singular. Though my spirit presses insistently on the arches of my eye socket, like a hawk trying to escape a cage, really the thing’s a ghost.
Fingers flutter and reach for yours. “Give me a hug,” I say.
Even if the outside domain has no room for an “I”, there is a “you”. I know that because I can see you. And through “we”, for a time, I can feel myself in the world.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on reveals.
“There’s earth right under our feet,” he said. “Earth and roots and worms – it can break through any time.”
How could I have known the ruined castle would terrorise him so? Imagined tourneys and jousting and round tables was what I expected. Instead, he saw decay, a child’s first glimpse of our impermanent hold on eternity.
“Everything’s okay, sweetie,” I said. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”
He seemed to recover until building began on the plot next-door.
Looking into the foundations’ depth he screamed, “dirt.”
For the next decade he wailed and fought whenever we took him outside.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot and endings.
Lyra and Will enter the café. Waves lap the sweeping littoral, and colonnades shade abandoned terraces. I sense the heat. This West African seafront belongs to my memory, not the author’s script. But the children who people the scene, fearful and hopeful, are strangers to me.
The book takes root and sprouts in an alien soil. Together the author and I create new and unintended versions. Our stories escape and breed in the wild with other tales. Dark shapes move across the hills.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot and endings.
This just couldn’t be right. It offended against everything I’d ever heard.
“You’re kidding, surely?”
“Why?” Ka’arsnak waved a tentacle. I’d learned this signalled irritation. “What’s wrong?”
“The portal opens into a shower?”
The tentacle waved more vigorously. “You wanted maybe a waterfall? Rainbows? Heavenly choirs?”
“Well, it’s not, you know, dignified. Not believable.”
The choking gargle was its way of expressing sarcastic mirth. “An angel with green skin and eight tentacles you can accept, but not a doorway through a bathroom? Get over it, you’re dead. Time to go. Chop-chop.”
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot and endings
This was my great-grandfather’s head. The intricate spiral patterns are moko, chiselled by skilled artists into living flesh and coloured with soot. Your museums prized them as curios. So men with moko were captured, decapitated, and sold to the whites. The supply of tattooed heads began to dwindle. For a while the market shortfall was eased by killing and posthumously tattooing slaves.
Nowadays, the heads are coming home as toi moko, tattoo art. But it’s really their mana we repatriate. There’s no precise translation of mana in your language. You might call it status, but it also means spiritual force.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot and endings.
I wove my way through the bright allure of market stalls, and the seductive scents of cafes. She was near now. My com told me she liked chocolate violets, so I stopped at a chocolatier’s to pick up a bag. Any speciality you wanted, the market had it. I wondered about flowers. Lilies, were her favourites, again according to my com. No – flowers would be overdoing it.
The GPS told me she’d left the market, and was walking along the canal bank. I just had to find her. You don’t pass up 86.7% compatibility. And that was just overall: our reading purchases overlapped by a whopping 92%, and leisure activity spending by category was 88%.
I need the chase, and Camden Lock was always good hunting territory for me. I’d already by-passed possibilities in the high 70s and one at 81.2%. But he was male, and I lean more to women. Still, he had been pretty. I hadn’t been immune to the smooth brown skin and smouldering eyes, when I checked him out.
When I turned onto the towpath, I knew I’d been right to pass over smouldering eyes. She was just ahead of me, disappearing into the darkness below a bridge. I saw a mane of blonde hair tumbling in ringlets down her back. I love blondes. There was a seductive sway to her hips, and long legs all the way up to the denim tight arse. To be fair, her legs could be judged a little too thin. I appreciated meat on a woman. But I definitely liked what I’d seen so far, as the towpath took a bend and she disappeared.
I wondered why she was walking the towpath. There were no commercial outlets here. There was something vaguely ungrateful about not consuming. Consuming was how you contributed to society. After most of the jobs were automated, grants from the Administrators replaced salaries. Most of us had become consumers rather than workers. I was quite proud that I qualified for a category B grant, because my tastes included the arts, and most artists and theatres hovered always on the edge of redundancy.
I put on a turn of speed, and caught up with her.
‘Hi there,’ I said, ‘chocolate violets for the lady.’
When she turned, I felt a surge of disappointment. Of course, she hadn’t included her appearance on her profile. Lots of people don’t. But still, from behind she’d looked hot. Her face was foxy, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean really, like a fox, thin and drawn into a snout, with a kind of feral alertness about her eyes. Her breasts were pretty good though.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t like chocolate. I’m allergic to it.’
‘But your consumer profile says chocolate violets are your favourites.’
She chuckled and took a step towards me. ‘The profile is a lie. It’s fake.’
‘How? I mean, I didn’t know you could do that. And why, why would you want to fake it?’
‘It’s easy enough. It’s all digital. You can rig a relay to transmit anything you like. I don’t have an implant. As for why, that’s easy too: privacy. I’m a person, not a consumer. You are too, did you but know it.’
None of this was going as I’d intended. I should have just pulled up a chair at smouldering eyes’ table. I wasn’t sure whether it was legal not to have an implanted com. In any case, she felt wrong, disquieting.
‘If I want privacy, I go to a shield,’ I said
‘And pay the admission charge to the shield, registering that as a consumption preference? I want my preferences to remain my business, not marketing data.’
It felt wrong, and dangerous, but it was exciting too. Her canine features were beginning to seem attractive to me; what the French call ‘jolie laid.’ I was beginning to wonder just how unusual and illicit her tastes might be.
‘And what are your preferences?’ I tried to keep the leer off my face, and out of my tone.
‘Subverting the system,’ she replied with the most captivating laugh. ‘Zapping the citizenry. My relay picked up your profile from your com, and when you locked onto me, adjusted what it sent out according to your profile.’
I had to laugh. ‘No wonder it was 86.7% compatibility then.’
‘I could as easily have made it 96.7%, but somehow that wouldn’t be so believable.’
’So who the hell are you really?’
She laughed again. ‘To know that, you’d have to get to know me; in the old fashioned way. Not my data, but me.’
I was confused. ‘But we might not be compatible.’
‘Well that’s the fun,’ she replied. ‘It’s all in the finding out.’
“You’ve seen hunting whales blowing bubble rings to corral herring, right?” Aman drummed her fingers on the angelstone, waiting for the girl to answer. A bleak wind blew in from the north, raising her hair into a crown.
“Uh, yes, sure.”
“Then can’t you see it’s the same with flowers? A woven wreath will corral a spirit. They suck energy from the air, forming a barrier the spirits cannot cross.”
Aman knew the girl was strong and clever enough to one day succeed her. Only the garland around the child’s head held her in check 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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot and endings.
“You got the right to one phone call,” he said, raising the visor of his helmet.
All my life I’d been rehearsing for this moment. If a genie offered you three wishes, your first wish had to be that all your other wishes came true. Scheherazade ended her story each night on a cliff-hanger so the sultan let her live another day to hear the ending. There had to be a twist with the phone too.
He smacked the night stick into his palm. “Come on, I haven’t got all night.”
“I must speak to the President,” I began.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot.
The station clock stood at 8:02 and its other minute hand at 8:16. The Dean’s train for London would arrive in thirteen minutes, or had already left a minute ago, depending on which time you accepted. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief, for the day was warm and he had hurried.
The great Cathedral bell had just boomed out the hour across the city – God’s time, marked by the stately transit of the sun across the sky. Sadly, the 9:15 train ran on Bristol and Exeter Railway time, transmitted down the galvanic wires from the Greenwich observatory.
Historical note: Until the advent of the railways, travel was a sedate affair. The fact that time in Exeter was 14 minutes later than London didn’t matter when it could take days to travel between the two cities by coach and horses. There were distinct time zones across the country. But this made railway timetabling very difficult and even dangerous with collisions because guards were using different times. In 1840 the Great Western Railway was the first company in the UK to standardise all its services on Greenwich Mean Time. By 1848 all railways used London time, and by 1855 most towns and cities had adopted the convention. Some towns held out. Exeter took its time from the Cathedral clock and the Dean refused to reset it to “railway time”. The station clock had two minute hands, one showing local time and the other one, railway time. In 1880, an act of Parliament imposed a uniform time on the whole of the UK.
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.
Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot.
Neil MacDonald Author 
