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

 

Fifa remained serene in the face of my confession, “I’m a bit in love with you, you know.”

She smiled, and the whole world lit up.

“Oh, you too?” and the starbursts were snuffed out. The sadness behind her smile spoke the unvoiced “it would be so much simpler if you weren’t.”

And it would have been. Simpler. This totally screwed up a simple business transaction.

Now I’d have to go on the run. Her husband would send someone after me. And then I’d be dead. It would have been so much simpler if I’d just pushed her as contracted.

 

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 creativity

A thin sunlight sifted through the branches like snow, dusting him with photons. He blinked in the sudden cold glare, hunching deeper into his army-surplus greatcoat.

Behind him, a single track of footprints snaked through the trees. Ahead, the landscape lay virgin, untrodden. His breath frosted above him, a speech bubble bereft of words.

The way home was long and uncertain, wolves shadowing every step of the trek. He threw back his head and filled the speech bubble with a silent howl of desperation. Exile makes sense if you were never really at home in the first 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.

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 creativity

“You may go anywhere you please in the house,” my uncle said when they took me to live with him, “but never into my study.”

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat.

My guardian taught me boundaries. I learned to push him all the way to, but not beyond, his limits. Boundaries reassure us that, within them, we’re safe

A rise in global temperature of 1.5^oC is tolerable. Beyond 2^o, we reach a tipping point.

Later, when I met Greta, there was no tipping point, only a fall. Real maps lack boundaries.

 

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 creativity