The cello nestled between her legs, comfortable as an old lover. But the bow was heavy and refused her command. A strangled note shivered the air.

All gone. The whole village.

She heard their screaming in the lone note, the beat of fists against the bolted door, the choking as smoke filled the hall. When she returned, only ash and charred bone remained.

Let my music be their revenge! The strings vibrated. The sun moved. Motes of light danced a gavotte – perhaps an illusion created by her tears, but she sensed Mama and Papa. The audience drew in a breath.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

The world carried on just as before. Only without him. Helga brought the mail to his bedside – a postcard with quaint conical rooftops of gaily coloured tiles. He didn’t need to read it to know the sender – Donald. Donald was travelling again.

Rage filled him. Without legs he would never travel anywhere again. After the rage came despair.

“Take it a day at a time.” Helga patted his hand.

A groan welled up like a retch from an empty stomach and he turned his face towards the window. A sparrow on the sill cocked its head in reply.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

The trading post was closed. Looked as if it had been since the owner walked off set. The past wasn’t for sale today, Donna thought happily, but the kids whined.

“Well, what can we do if the museum’s shut?” asked Brian, her eldest. “Maybe, go watch a gunfight?”

Donna peered through the fly-smeared windscreen, as if she might glimpse the answer. Seeing the future is easy – all you need is hope. To understand the past is much harder – that takes honesty.

“Why, we’ll get our kicks down Route 66 of course,” she said, the old song playing only for her.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Making the first mark is a terrible joy, an unforgiving test, he thinks.  Until that act, the paper is a white pre-world of every possibility. Afterwards, passages form and doors clang shut. It is the moment when the hawk hangs motionless in the sky before it stoops for the kill. And the universe holds a stilled expectancy. The brush trembles in his hand.

The sitter adjusts her position.  “Are you alright?” she asks.

He wipes a bead of sweat from his brow. What if I’ve lost it?

“Yes,” he says brusquely, and dips the brush into the vermilion.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here. Congratulations on your fourth anniversary as Friday Fictioneers Facilitator, Rochelle, and thanks. The blank prompt this week was a challenge and a terrible joy.

Fisherman’s twine, a bottle-top, seashells, a smooth pebble, a knobbly rock. The treasures in Granddad’s cabinet were as the man himself – surprising, various, and chosen with love. These were his treasure chest and his story book.

Heaving myself up onto the stool, I gazed. Though I’d seen the cabinet before, the contents changed with time, a bit like Granddad’s memories.

“What are these?” I asked, reaching for a stack of coins.

“Arrr,” he said, a protective arm drawing me down with the coins to his lap. “Arrr, Jim lad. Them I got when we took a Spanish galleon.”

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

I was cooking breakfast, bacon sizzling in the pan, when they called to tell me you were dead. Had been dead for four years. Perhaps murdered. The gears of time slip, and the past crashes into today with the force of a motorway pile-up. Events concertina, throwing up mountain ranges and dredging shadowed valleys.

If only I hadn’t. Or you didn’t. I search the Internet for four-year-old details. A marriage gone wrong. A property dispute. A failed police investigation. The news runs out as attention shifted.

The bacon starts to crisp and burn. I serve-up just in time.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

“That’s an awful lot of water in one place,” he said, standing on the edge of the world and scanning the ocean. He wheeled, strode back into the hotel, and never returned to the seashore.

Instead, he built himself a pond, enclosed within the courtyard of his farmhouse. The water duplicated the sky, reflecting inverted trees. The low ramparts of the steading held chaos at bay. He was content.

“The ocean is very big,” he told his wife, “but we are also very big.”

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Howard paced the corridor on his nightly rounds, overhead lights receding to the vanishing point. On each side, shutters protected treasures he had never seen:  the deeds to a castle; a dragon coiled tight around an oak chest of jewels; diadems of starlight.

Howard Carter felt destined for greatness. He wouldn’t be a security guard all his life.

“What do you see in there?” people would ask him.

“Wonderful things,” he would reply.

But he knew what dreamed behind those shuttered doors remained beautiful only until the moment a door was opened on cardboard boxes, overstuffed sofas, and cricket bats.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

The man who came back from space is upstairs dying. When Dad returned, there were medals, starbursts fireworks, and marching bands.  He was war hero and celebrity rolled into one, and also my father. Some rubbed off on me – at school I got the girls.

But he never talked about it.  Not to me, or anyone. He never did anything again and became more and more withdrawn, taking to his bed five years ago. Though I keep hoping he’ll tell me the secret of the stars, all he’s said is “fame’s not all it’s cracked up to be”.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Legs pumping, heart pounding, Irgul thrust his way up the mountain path. He raced through the stone archway into the cloying fug of the memory chamber. Donba glared, strong arms corded as he stirred the thick vat.

Irgul bent, hands on thighs, gasping for breath. “Sorry, sorry, I’m late. Give me a minute.”

“It’s a solemn responsibility keeping the tribe’s remembrances mixed. Where were you?”

Irgul winked. ”Making memories.”

His friend had to laugh. “Yes, I saw them arrive. Crimson. Nice one, lad.”

He took the handle from Donba and ladled, lest the heavy elements separate out.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.