Muffled in mist, the shouted words are indistinct. But she hears the rattle of heavy chain and the clangour of metal. The ship is making ready to depart for another week, and seven days’ aloneness descends again.

The ship’s horn gives a last bass call, like a circling raptor. Go and open the door, she thinks, but is afraid of the creatures that will populate the silence.  Go and open the door. Death won’t be standing there in his dark fedora.

She opens the door, but drizzle shrouds the vessel heading into the sound. There is moisture on her cheek.

 

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

This was a technical exercise, a challenge to myself to write two different stories each using the same fifty words in a different order.

1

The man sobbed as he had forced the pony trap up the rolling road. A fear loomed, and gnawed for his heart. Eyes took in the castle, silhouette against the sunset, knew he had left it too late to save her from death, and a shadow of gates was all.

2

The castle heart was a man-trap.  The pony knew too, her eyes rolling in fear. Save for the late sunset, all as he had left it. The gates loomed up, took in and gnawed from his silhouette.  He sobbed and forced a road, had to, against the shadow of death.

 

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

 

Almost nothing survives of the Old People. The radioactive rubble, of course, will endure for tens of thousands of years. And they left twisted metal and crumbling concrete.  But of the people themselves, nothing. Save this one fragment of a letter, written in Anglish by a young man to his lover in Birmingham. He plans to visit her.

It is from this letter that we learn they had mastered matter transference. Perhaps they are not gone. Maybe they beamed to new homes in the stars. We only know this unnamed writer was coming to her in his “beamer”.

 

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.  For readers whose first language isn’t English, it may (or may not) help you to know that beamer is slang for BMW, or more generically a cool car.

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.

 

Crow was alone. So he brought form and shape to the Earth. From the Earth’s belly creatures emerged, swarming, swimming, and walking each according to its type.

But still Crow was lonely. So he played a trick, holding in his beak a shiny pebble, round as the sun and smooth as a lake. The Earth wanted the shiny thing and grew a grasping hand. Quick as a tornado, Crow seized the wrist, pulling until the hand stretched into an arm. Twisting until it rose from the mud, he made a torso. The mud sat up, looked around, and said “Wow!”

 

 

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 world-building

Amidst the destruction, Solomon found temptation, many temptations. He could give in to horror and to anger, or pick through the rubble for the veins of value running through the hard-core. Or he might browse the strange maps uncovered behind the collapsed cladding. The choice he made now would define him – a sensitive man, a thief, or an explorer? As explosions exposed the bones of things, so war revealed the essence of a person.

Solomon stretched his arms wide like a Cecil B de Mille prophet and, conscious of the theatricality, roared “Why me?”

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 world-building.

PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

There is a seat, a special seat. I won’t say where that diner is, or you’ll hunt out the chair. Sit in it and the world goes kinda flickery, customers fade to wraiths. A sensation in the pit of your stomach like an express elevator, and then you’re there, whenever you feel you want to belong.

For me the destination is always 1953 – happy and obedient children, proud and diligent families, genial neighbours, convertibles with chrome and fins. For Paul, 1965 and a supercilious cook giving him that look, hissing “no negroes.”

 

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 world-building.

“You remember that letter, Dad?”

The note told his parents he didn’t love them.  It was a harsh thing, but he was angry as only a teenage boy can be.  The storm passed in days, and he didn’t think about it again.

The guilt kicked in during his twenties. He considered confessing he hadn’t meant the rejection, but that seemed weird a decade on, and he lived with the remorse. Forty years later, at his father’s deathbed, he unburdened.

“Don’t remember that at all,” the old man 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.

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 world-building.

 

The town square was placid. Bread was bought, coffee drunk, chess played.

I was never placid. Orderly routine filled me with divine rage. As a child, crossing the square, I would imagine a detonator in my pocket. Click, and Mme Albert vanished; click, and M Leroy became a puff of smoke. As I grew older, I dreamed of knives and bombs.

You probably think I’m a psychopath and came to a sticky end. Think again. I made my fortune and bought this town. Deploying the citizens on the board is much more fun than killing them.

 

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 world-building

My name is Rahmathon. You look hungry after your trek – I can sell you a sheep if you like. Yes, you’ve reached the Yagnobi. My people have lived here in this high valley for more than a thousand years. We tend our cattle and cultivate our wheat. Yields are poor, but without bread people are not people.

We have forgotten who we were – Sogdians. From Samarkand we once traded glass all the way east to imperial China and silk all the way west to Byzantium.

I can make you a good price for this tender little lamb.

 

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 likeability

 

Sophia already had everything. The only possible gift was sensation.

“How about saudade?” The little man peered over half-moon glasses. “A Portuguese emotion – the pleasure of feeling sad. Very popular. There’s even a music that goes with it: Fado”

“No,” I said. “Too much like wistfulness. Besides, I want something nobody has ever experienced before.”

The wrinkled rapturesmith retired to the dark back-shop. “I think this might suit, Sir.”

He proffered a small leather box.

“Chocfulness,” he said. “The pleasure of finishing something you really enjoyed but probably shouldn’t have done, like eating a whole box of chocolates.”

 

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 likeability