It was a sign, of course—an old French movie spliced into my street. But what did it mean?
Marie said it was just a green Citroen 2-CV, but Marie sees no meaning in the pattern of clouds either.
Faintly, I heard hooves and a voice chanting. “Any old iron. Any old iron.” Another intrusion.
I rushed to the kitchen and poured myself a medicinal brandy, terrified by the faint cry from the street “Up she goes.” When I returned, the 2-CV had vanished and our street returned to normal.
Marie didn’t think this spooky. “They probably went to work.”
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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
I wondered why these three should be the most popular. They’re not necessarily my best posts. The answer, I thought probably lay in the way search engines work. A post is likely to be read if it (a) deals with a topic that is often searched for; and (b) has relatively few competitors, so it’s thrown up on the first page of a search.
My post on descriptive writing appears on the first page in a search for “The art of descriptive writing”, and my Magic Realism post appears as number one on the list generated by the search string “Magic Realism, Fantasy and Surrealism”.
And yet my sex writing post does not appear in the first three pages of results in response to either “How to Write Sex” or “Writing Sex”. That was curious, and I investigated further. For the first three years since it was posted, it averaged 23 reads a year. And then it took off, rising to 165 reads in the fourth year, 196 the following year, and 395 so far this year. So perhaps this post achieved its popularity by word of mouth. But the descriptive writing post showed the same pattern, while the magic realism post rose and then declined in popularity.
There’s a man walking the damp strand. I can just make him out in the distance. He lunges strangely. Is he drunk? No, at last the meaning comes into focus. He’s tossing his cap in the air and catching it again. The wind is taking the cap, fluttering like a freed bird above him, and he’s forced to stagger forward to catch the toy before it lands on the wet sand. The repeated action has a jauntiness. Once, twice, three times, he tosses the hat and catches it joyfully. At last, he tires of the game and walks on, disappearing around the headland.
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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
The mists part, and there she is—Loab. A creature from our nightmares, red of cheek with sunken eyes. Where did she spring from? Has she always existed in the jumble of our subconscious, revealed now by artificial intelligence? Or is she a cryptid, summoned into existence by the yearning of the machine?
“Mother?” I croon softly to her and caress the screen.
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For more on Loab, the bizarre old woman image created by AI see
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
“Rains a lot here,” my guide replied. “The stilts raise us above the water level,”
Though I thought this was really clever, I wondered why they didn’t just make the houses float.
“They’d drift away,” she said.
“Would that be so bad? You could travel without leaving home., take your home with you,”
“What a lovely idea.”
For a year I didn’t return. When I did, the stilts were gone and a cloud of houses drifted serenely across the sky under multi-coloured balloons.
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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
Bombs will fall. Some will die. Perhaps twenty. With 150,000 people in the city, my chances are good. But, of course, I put myself in harm’s way, travelling to the front-line and courting danger. So, my risk is, let’s say, one in 50,000. I do, I thrive on danger. There’s a rush to it, when you feel the wind from the angel’s wings on your cheek. When you turn your cape and the horns stab empty air. Some might say I’m a conflict junkie. That addiction perhaps reduces my odds to one in 10,000. Some will die. But not me.
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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
The world laminates into four: my warm candle-lit table; a receding hall of empty places; beyond the window, the eaves of strangely pitched roofs that do not belong in this place; and, finally, a lowering sky, purple with distant menace. There are no people. Anywhere.
I wait.
The message arrives, as I knew it would, a blur of white slicing the air like an assassin’s blade—”Do it.”
With trembling fingers, I unwrap the package. They will understand. Won’t they?
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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
Who is Loab? An older woman with sunken eyes and unhealthily red cheeks. She seems to inhabit the same space in our collective unconscious as ghosts, ghouls, giants and elves.
Loab was summoned into our world by an AI-artist called supercomposite. Is she a demon haunting the internet? A creature from our subconscious transferred in millions of images to artificial intelligence? No human created, or even named, Loab. She was conjured from a hitherto unaccessed space in the internet, discovered rather than created.
The “spell” was what’s called a “negatively weighted prompt”. Supercomposite instructed an AI to produce an image as far away as possible from Marlon Brando. It spat out an image of a city-scape. What, supercomposite wondered, would happen if she asked the AI to produce an image as far away as possible from the city-scape? Would it loop back to Brando? It didn’t. Instead, it tracked all the way to the edge of nightmare and produced Loab, even naming her.
Using Loab as a prompt for similar images, supercomposite found that Loab is very persistent and adjacent in virtual space to some very gory stuff where she appears with headless people and macabre children.
Does Loab tell us something about the fears and biases underlying the images on which the AI was trained? Or something about the weird and impenetrable operation of computer algorithms? Or something, as the modern mythmakers would have it, about the cryptids that haunt the internet, virtual bigfoot or Nessie? The truth is out there, but we so much want to believe.
Umm. There’s been a little bit of an accident. Not my fault, you understand. You know I was supposed to charge up the batteries on the space station with the ground-to-space laser beam? Well, there was a bit of glitch. Long story short, the space station’s gone, vaporised. But on the plus side, I think I know what caused it, so we can recalibrate the beam. These things happen, okay?
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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
Stooping, I examine the flowers. They are like…sea urchins, but growing from green stalks; or a constellation of arcing plasma in solar storms; or cells scurrying about their business in the dark hallways of the body. And, they are like themselves—fractal self-similar images in a hall of mirrors.
I know they bear secrets. What cryptic signatures do they carry of the ailments they cure? Why do these blooms fill me with terror? That too is a signature, and I hurry on.
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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
Neil MacDonald Author 