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.
Sam was a man. Not a special man, he passed everywhere pretty much unnoticed. The probability he was outside equalled the chances he was inside. He was everywhere and nowhere. And thus he made his living. He could pass through locked gates and stout walls, ferreting-out secrets, spying on clandestine meetings.
One day a woman noticed him. Or rather, the exquisite workmanship of the bracelet he was fingering. The observation collapsed his wave function, and he was in full view. At that moment Sam opted for the many-world hypothesis and slipped sideways, at right angles to reality.
Note on physics: the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics holds that, until the act of measurement, the location of a sub-atomic particle can only be described by the device of a wave function which describes the probability that it is in a particular place. The alternative many worlds interpretation says that the wave function is real and that all possible positions exist across a multiplicity of worlds.
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.
This is my submission for the Scrivener’s Forge exercise on plot. I confess I cheated on this one by using a story I’ve already published, but it exemplifies so well the “go in late, come out early” advice.
Bomaru’s Quest Part IV
The creature’s head punched round, leathery scales abrading his skin. Bomaru held tight, the sinews of his arms corded like autumn branches, slowly forcing the winged reptile’s head to the ground. Teeth sharp as spear-points snapped, close enough for the clash to shiver through his straining grip, and the stench of the creature’s foul breath to taint his nostrils. It was no ordinary strength that maintained his grip. He knew sweet Farlaine would die if he failed, and the knowledge lent him the force of ten. Bomaru twisted with a desperate might. With a sickening crack, the dragon’s body gave one last twitch and was still.
‘Wow! You just killed a dragon with your bare hands,’ Michael observed. ‘Hard to believe isn’t it?’
Michael was heartily sick of Bomaru and Farlaine.
Yet bold Bomaru strode on over the evil creature’s carcass, undaunted by his ordeal, and rifled through the dragon’s hoard, until he found the blade, Srithanthril. Farlaine’s father had borne that sword in battle before he fell to the Worms on the plain of carnage. None but Srithanthril’s wizard-honed edge could sever the bewitched bonds holding Farlaine shackled to the promontory.
‘Cool, you got the magic sword.’ Michael’s tone held acid mockery. ‘Bewitched bonds, tum-ti-tum.’
Bomaru raced sure-footed down the hillside, pebbles slithering and rolling. It was almost as if the earth itself bore him forward to Farlaine, hastening her release. Farlaine’s roots were deep in the land, and the land ached at her peril.
When Bomaru reached the foreshore, the tide was lapping around his beloved’s ankles. She screamed and strained against her bonds.
Michael’s attention was captured by the wild, age-carved, crags, while Bomaru’s was on the huge kraken that reared up, reaching clawed arms towards the sacrificial virgin.
‘How do you like them apples?’ Michael sneered at Bomaru, and turned away from the combat to watch the sea birds, wheeling lithe in the thermals that rose from the cliff.
When he gazed far, Michael saw the birds soar at the cloud-front that roiled against the updraft, unable to press forward over the ocean. It entranced him. He was seeing the wind itself in the invisible barrier that held the creatures firm as Farlaine’s bonds. When he studied close, Michael discerned the rough porosity of the cliff-face, the tiny cavities and crags made by an aeon of the insistent sea’s soft probing fingers. He peered into one crevice, with a scrutiny deep and searching, and detected, in a jumble of twigs and seaweed, the ghosts of a guillemot’s past home. He heard the minute skulking of the lives folk never have the patience to notice.
While battle raged below, Michael probed the mysteries of the promontory. The woes of men meant no more to that ancient headland than the ephemeral scrabblings in the nooks and crannies of reality. Farlaine’s cries, as Bomaru hacked and hewed, troubled him no more than the calls of the kittiwakes. Michael marked the transit of the sun against the rock, striving to capture the slow shifting of colour. He saw subtle reddening where there had been only grey. He witnessed crags and boulders that leapt up from the escarpment, like footpads from an alley, as the light picked them out in relief.
The strife behind him quieted. ‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?’ he quoted to Bomaru. ‘Oh frabjous day. Calloo! Callay!’
The headless body of the kraken was sinking into the waves, while Bomaru clove Farlaine’s bonds with the enchanted blade, Srithanthril.
Michael frowned and tore his thoughts from the precious secrets of the eternal cliff, and the slow march of time. Farlaine was freed. The realm was saved. The people rejoiced.
‘One day, one goddamn day,’ said Michael, ‘I will kill you, Bomaru. One day, I’ll be able to live free of you. I’m better than this. I can perceive the world in a guillemot’s nest.’
‘Perhaps,’ Bomaru scoffed. ‘But not this day.’
Michael sighed, and began the writing of Bomaru’s Quest, Part V.
The artist sketching by the riverside was young, his long brown hair stringy and unwashed. But his pencil captured with clean lines the dark surging water, grey cloud lowering close, and granite houses on the far bank.
“Wanna buy it?” he asked, noticing my attention. “It’s yours for a tenner.”
The deal done, I rushed my prize home, spread it on the desk and took up the rubber. My hand lovingly consumed his effort, erasing the lines to pristine whiteness. I only ever work on other artists’ canvases. One day I will acquire a Michelangelo sketch and create a masterpiece.
Note for US readers. A rubber in British English is what you call eraser, not what you first thought.
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.
A thousand years of footfall and cart wheels had worn grooves into the slabs of the alley. Cool arches, crafted by stonemasons gone half a millennium, shaded Rick from the Mediterranean sun. History lay heavy as a lover on this place.
And yet time had gnawed it hollow. Beneath his feet, metal lids covered the entrances to tunnels. Trunks of piping and gossamer threads of cabling slowly strangled the ancient street. Rick hacked through the undergrowth. He knew at its heart would be a secret, sleeping in a glass case. A kiss would awaken an old and terrible beauty.
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 character and action
