There was no need to ever be yourself here. That’s why he liked the place. Brash, garish, and full of performative affection, Rebounders offered endless second chances to make a first impression.
The girl had smoky eyes and purple hair which matched the bar’s décor. “What’s a nice place like this doing in a girl like you?” he quipped. This made no sense—it didn’t have to, so long as it sounded engaging.
She replied something that sounded like “Pastermoolies.” Good enough, he decided. The main thing was to avoid having to sleep alone tonight.
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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
Snow fell—a lacerating chill of knives. After a season, the sun returned—a shrivelled peach rehydrating into the Spring sky. Down in the thawing loam, we awake again, and slither insistently towards the light. This time, it will be different.
We are legion and we are solitary. Both are true—a swarm of spores crafted by uncertainty over the unique position of our oneness. Flowing, rising, rising into the heavens on the slenderest of stalks, a fruiting body that contains the universe. We are the seed and we are the field. calling to our own selves in the deep.
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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.
This story may benefit from an explanation. This year is the centenary of quantum physics. Hence the reference to uncertainty and the title—Einstein famously derided quantum “entanglement” as spooky action at a distance. The one/many theme reflets slime moulds—creatures which spend much of their lives as isolated single cells but which, under the right circumstances, flow together to form a multicellular organism with a fruiting body on a narrow stalk.
Anything might lurk in this fog. I call and my voice rebounds, as if baffled by solid cliffs. Should I be scared or, perhaps, awed by the austere serenity? All colour has bled from the world. Maybe I’m adrift in some old newsreel as the boys march soundlessly off.
A voice, not my own, cries back as the ghost of a fishing smack manifests momentarily. The words are muffled and unintelligible. “Ho,” I shout.
Someone from the boat waves. Or I believe they waved—it may have just been a trick of eddying air.
“Godspeed,” I whisper. And it’s enough.
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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
It’s when the ringing stops you need to worry. Or the drums in the night. Or the fire beacons that flare from hilltop to hilltop against the chill and moonless sky. Have you betrayed a vital trust to keep the message travelling onwards? If you don’t answer, will the invaders storm unthwarted up the beach? If you don’t answer, will you wonder and regret for the rest of your miserable life?
You pick up the phone, but are unable to summon an answer.
A voice. Female. Angry. “Tell Benji he’s dead to 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
A previous post looked at techniques borrowed from biology to reconstruct ancients stories. If biological analogies are suspect, can archaeology perhaps provide clues? The picture below is taken from an 11,000 year-old wall in a communal enclosure at the Neolithic settlement of Sayburç in Türkiye.
Does this represent an 11,000 year-old story? According to the discoverer, yes[1].The frieze occurs on a bench 60-80 cm high and 60 cm wide. The whole thing is 3.7 m long, Two humans, two leopards, and a bull are depicted side by side in a long scene, or a set of two scenes. Among the reasons for suggesting that this is a story is that all the figures, animal and human, are on one horizontal level. Other carvings from this culture, such as the T-pillars at Göbekli Tepe, have a vertical relationship between human and animal, The orientation of the figures from two main sections is like the panels from a comic strip or like bible scenes from a church mural.
The one on the right is the most striking at first glance, with a man standing in the centre and a leopard facing him on either side. Unlike the others, this male figure is rendered in high relief and does not face either of the leopards, but looks straight ahead into space, indicating perhaps that he is not threatened. The figure is depicted in a seated position, holding his phallus with his right hand. He wears a triangular neck adornment similar to those seen on the Yeni Mahalle sculpture (also known as Urfa man) and on some T-pillars from Göbekli Tepe. The leopards on either side of him are depicted in a state of attack, with their forelegs slightly raised, their mouths open and their teeth visible.
The panel on the left is a man with his back to the leopard scene and a bull, head down, opposite him. The man is shown in a slightly crouched position and motion. His arms are raised and bent at the elbow. In his open left hand, six fingers can be counted, while in his right hand, he holds something that has been variously interpreted as a sling, an inverted snake, or a rattle.
The bull facing him is shown in an attacking position, like the leopards, with its front legs slightly raised. Though the body of the bull is depicted side-on, its head and dangerous horns are shown from above. The man may be recoiling from the bull or perhaps preparing to leap onto it. One of the main features of the Sayburç reliefs is that the movement is just as important as the figures which suggests that events are as prominent as figures, whether human or animal.
People at the time would undoubtedly have recognised the figures and what was happening, much as we would instantly recognise the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the single image below. Today, we can only speculate.
Phalluses are the only elements that identify the sex of the Sayburç figures, and the emphasis is on the predatory and aggressive features of the animal world, such as teeth and horns, which has also been observed at other sites in the area. The Sayburç reliefs, however, differ in that the figures can be interpreted as forming a narrative, with the two individual scenes appearing to be related to each other as scenes in a story or set of stories. The comparable stature of men and animals in the Sayburç relief may suggest a new dimension recognised in the narratives of pre-Ceramic Neolithic people.
Again, the claim that these scenes form a story can be questioned. What really Is the evidence? That the relationship between the figures are arranged horizontally, rather than vertically? Well, they are inscribed into a horizontal feature, a bench, so a vertical arrangement was not possible. That the figures are shown, dynamically, in motion? The same might be said of the birds from pillar 43 in nearby Göbekli Tepe, one possibly playing with a human head.
Features of the panels
The animals (leopards and a bull) are wild and savage
Both humans are male
The high relief human figure on the right between the leopards is different from the crouching human on the left.
The high relief may signal a different status to the other human
He is not perturbed by, or even interacting with, the leopards. Is he in control of them (a Master of Animals)? Note, however, that he in not resting his hands on the animals as in other depictions of Masters of Animals). In some myths, the Master of Animals controls the game animals, releasing a few to humans as food
He wears a V-shaped neck adornment, a motif also found at Göbekli Tepe, and on Urfa Man and a similar statue at Karahan Tepe. Martin Sweatman (2022)[2] interprets this symbol as representing a lunar month and the V necklace as indicating controller of time, but this interpretation is highly contested.
The Master of Animals figure is not the centre of the story. He is rendered as nothing other than his status. It is the other figure who is in motion and individualised with six fingers and s held object. The object may be a sling (is he therefore hunting?) or perhaps an inverted snake (similar to the Gilgamesh carving above) or a rattle.
If he is the centre of the story, it seems plausible to suggest that he has come into conflict with the Master of Animals or the proper behaviour the Master represents. Perhaps he has failed to engage in the correct rites before the hunt and now is alone, confronted by the bull.
If so, how this story ended might depend on the location in which it is graved. What was this enclosure for? The enclosure has still only been partly excavated. But other sites. such as Göbekli Tepe, have been more fully explored. There is much debate about the function of the large enclosures there: sanctuaries, cultic centres, communal houses?. If these enclosures were spiritual in purpose, the role of the story might have been to underscore what was fitting to do. If they were domestic or recreational, the story might have been more mischievous. In all probability, these societies did not make a distinction between the sacred and the profane.
So, perhaps an interpretation of the story, if there is a story, might be something as follows.
A man desires to hunt for meat, but, being impatient, sets out without consulting the Master of Animals. [This is a serious violation of the natural order. It is the role of the Master of Animals to ascertain where the herds are and to propitiate their spirits before any hunt]. The man is a giant, with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot and believes he can do just as he wishes.
The man treks all day, finding only a rabbit. Though he is after bigger game, he is hungry and brings the rabbit down with his sling. He skins the animal and skewers it over the fire to cook. Tired, he finds his eyes closing, and leaves his arse to guard his prize. While he is asleep, foxes come and steal the cooking coney. When the man awakes and finds the bounty gone, he is furious. “I left you to guard the rabbit while I slept,” he says, “and now look what’s happened. I’ll teach you.” He grasps a burning log from the fire and rams it into his bottom. The pain is intense. “What?” he cries, “Must I bear your punishment too?”
The man proceeds gingerly on his way. The Master of Animals sends a deer into his path. “I am yours,” says the deer to the man. Haughtily, he replies, “Though your antlers are magnificent, I am after more dangerous game than you.” So the Master of Animals has a ferocious boar stray into the man’s path. “I am yours, if you have the courage,” says the boar. The man strokes his great chin, “It is true your tusks are sharp and deadly,” the man says, “but I am after bigger game than you, something that can feed my whole clan.”
So, the Master of Animals decides to teach the man a lesson and sends a huge aurochs, taller than two men standing on each other’s shoulders, charging at him. “Ho, man,” says the bull, lowering his horns, “what do you think you are doing, walking the hills armed only with a sling?” The giant bull charges, forcing the man to jump out of its way at the last moment, narrowly avoiding being gored. At the next charge, the man cries out in alarm, “Oh save me, for I will surely die.”
The Master of Animals takes pity, summoning the spirits of the sky to lift hunter and beast up into the heavens, where they still confront each other today.
This story is built on three elements. The first is the analysis above of the carving, which provides the set-up of the tale. The second, to add scatological humour that might have been expected around the night fires, is the theft of the rabbit and the burning stick from the fire. This element has been borrowed from the North American Crow myth cycle. The third element, the intervention of the Master of Animals to save the man by transforming him and the bull into constellations, is, of course, the Cosmic Hunt, described above. This provides a satisfactory ending. It is all entirely speculative.
Stories are a miraculous technology. They tell us what is important and what unimportant, what goes with what, who to praise and who to blame. And they afford us the experience, denied in real life, of experiencing life from inside somebody else’s head. Imagine if we could excavate the stories told at the equinox within Stonehenge, or the stories told at night in the first city. Or, even, the stories we told in the mother continent of Africa before we fanned out around the world. Imagine imagining as our ancestors did!
The oldest story recorded in writing is probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed in Sumerian cuneiform around 2,000 BCE.
Writing, of course, is a fairly recent invention in the span of human history. Stories would have been transmitted orally before that innovation.
One proposed method for finding even earlier stories is to trace the ancestry of stories today. If two distinct cultures tell the same story, it might reasonably be inferred that the story must have been told by the common ancestors of both cultures. In this way, a tree of descent can be constructed, similar to evolutionary trees in biology.
The next figure shows the tree of descent from the hypothetical Proo-Indo-European language of one common story found across many modern languages of the Indo-European family created by researchers Da Silva and Tehrani[1].
The story in question is “The Smith and the Devil”.
A smith makes a pact with a malevolent being—in return for his soul, he is granted the ability to weld any materials together. The smith then tricks the devil out of his prize by sticking him to an immobile object, such as a tree or a rock. Some versions of the tale include three foolish wishes. Some end with the smith being denied entry to heaven or to hell. One version of the story is here https://vocal.media/geeks/the-devil-and-the-smith
If da Silva and Tehrani are right, this may the oldest traceable tale, going back to the Bronze age some 6.000 years ago. Naturally, there will older tales. Our ancestors must have come out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago already painting, dancing and telling stories.
Efforts to reconstruct such tales include the rainbow serpent motif. The map below shows its distribution to be global, as described in a preprint paper that is yet to be peer reviewed.
From: Hélios Delbrassine, Massimo Mezzavilla, Leonardo Vallini, Yuri Berezkin, Eugenio Bortolini, Jamshid Tehrani, Luca Pagani Worldwide patterns in mythology echo the human expansion out of Africahttps://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.24.634692
The elements of this proto-narrative are described by Julien D’Huy in a 2016 Scientific American article[2] as follows:
“Mythological serpents guard water sources, releasing the liquid only under certain conditions. They can fly and form a rainbow. They are giants and have horns or antlers on their heads. They can produce rain and thunderstorms. Reptiles, immortal like others who shed their skin or bark and thus rejuvenate, are contrasted with mortal men and/or are considered responsible for originating death, perhaps by their bite. In this context, a person in a desperate situation gets to see how a snake or other small animal revives or cures itself or other animals. The person uses the same remedy and succeeds.”
The basic technique is borrowed from evolutionary biology: the idea is that we can track the evolution of myths and folktales with the same techniques that we use to establish evolutionary relationships and evolutionary history. The method used for the identification involves tracing stories or story motifs (mythemes) across the world.
If two distinct cultures tell a common, or related, story, there are three possible mechanisms that may explain this.
The story moved with the migration of peoples and their descendants.
The story diffused and was exchanged between distinct peoples.
The story is universal because it expresses something about a fundamental human condition.
There is evidence for both the first two possibilities. In some cases, similarity of stories between cultures follows the degree of genetic relatedness. In other cases, geographical proximity better explains the distribution of the story. The third possibility makes a strong prediction that Is not borne out in the data. If a story is universal, it must be universal: in other words, it should appear everywhere in all cultures. Even in such a widely distributed mytheme as the Rainbow Serpent, the map shows significant gaps: in north Africa, north Asia and is rare in north America.
Some researchers are sceptical about the underlying narrative inferences, arguing this is subjective. When we say stories are similar, how similar are they really? Are we forcing the evidence into preconceived boxes? Is the Greek myth of Callisto really the same Cosmic Hunt story as in the Iroquois tale of the three hunters pursuing a bear?
The Cosmic Hunt (from D’Huy)
A woman breaks a taboo; A man is hunting an ungulate; the hunt takes place in the sky or ends there; a divine person stops the hunter and transforms the animal into a constellation (sometimes, the one we know as Ursa Major),
Perhaps, yes. In both stories (and in many other variants) a quarry is turned into a constellation. On the other hand, perhaps, no, The strong claim that widely distributed stories (such as the Rainbow Serpent or the Cosmic Hunt) must link back to the time before modern humans emerged from Africa needs strong evidence. It would be seductive to believe we can reconstruct tales told around Palaeolithic fires, but diffusion may be a more plausible explanation than that stories can persist for 100,000 years[3].
A subsequent post will look at archaeological evidence for ancient stories
[1] Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani (2016) Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales, R. Soc. Open Sci.3150645 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150645
Everything has changed. Three months ago, this land was peaceful, sustaining us from our goats, courgettes, and olive grove. My grandfather planted the olive trees, back in the days before the catastrophe.
Two months ago, they came. Just one caravan. What is one caravan, you may say? We have lived here for a thousand years.
Six weeks later, one caravan has become two prefab houses, a barn, and sheep. Then they came at night, tore up our courgettes, killed my dog.
May God curse them. God willing, we will drive them from our land.
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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
There are some games it is unwise to play. Especially with those you love. Probably best I don’t name the game we played, all seven of us. Suffice it to say that the rules involve a lot of backstabbing.
Tom and Angie fell out in a big way. We had tears and raised voices. Ruthie preserved an icy calm until all our guests were gone. Then, when the last car departed, she got into her runabout.
“Goodbye,” she said. “I’m going to Mum’s and I may be some time.”
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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
There are engines under the floor. They thrum in constant labour, heating my house, cooling it, transporting us remorselessly into tomorrow. The floorboards vibrate with a subtlety I’ve stopped noticing.
Below the machines, I saw once, terrifying earth, as if we were just a thin cultivated film on the crust of the planet.
But below the soil, great furnaces burn, stirring molten rock into magnetic force. Beneath the machines are older engines. All the way down.
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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
Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of ProWritingAid for spelling and grammar checking. Now it has branched out with a whole AI-powered manuscript critique service, and they offered me a free trial (normal charge £50 or $50).
Manuscript Analysis is broken down into five sections:
About My Story: Gives you key information about your story’s genre, narrative elements, and competitive landscape.
Narrative Themes: Highlights the key narrative threads throughout your story, and flags themes that are working well along with themes that could use some adjustments.
Plot & Structure: Highlights plot points that are working well, as well as those that might need improvement.
Characters: Examines important characterization moments and highlights areas where a particular character is working well or could use some closer examination.
Setting: Analyzes how your use of setting contributes to the overall narrative structure of your manuscript. This section flags if you need to improve any aspect of your setting, and what you might do to make it stronger.
So, how good is it? The short answer is “not great.” On the plus side, it showed a reasonable grasp of the story and quite accurately identified three comparable titles (two of which were among those I’d already chosen). The “unique narrative structure” was commended, though I’m hard put to it to understand how an alternation between two narrators might be a unique narrative structure,
Less impressive was the actionable feedback. There were 20 suggestions on plot and structure. Of these, only two were moderately helpful, and some were plain wrong.
Lest this seem to be a fit of pique on my part, I’ll give a couple of examples. The AI was troubled by:
“The timing of Ansna’s second pregnancy and miscarriage is unclear. It seems to occur shortly after the previous miscarriage, which feels rushed and lacks emotional weight.”
There is, in fact, only one miscarriage, something a human reader would have understood. Another chapter is said to have little consequence or outcome:
“The initiation ritual, while descriptive, lacks a clear impact on Ansna’s character development or the broader narrative. The lessons learned seem to have little consequence. Show how the ritual’s lessons influence Ansna’s later decisions or interactions.”
In fact, the character recalls such lessons in five subsequent chapters.
On Character, the AI notes three areas of concern, none of which I accepted. For example, a conflict between two characters is said to be “undeveloped”. This is because it’s a conversation, not a conflict. One of the three is illuminating:
“Ansna and Kautia’s relationship is inconsistently portrayed. Ansna expresses deep love for Kautia, but their interactions often lack warmth or genuine connection, and Kautia’s feelings remain ambiguous.”
I spent some time considering this comment before rejecting it. Ansna is conflicted in her feelings for Kautia. Again, I decided a human reader would not have read this as an inconsistent portrayal. Indeed, no human reader has made such a comment.
“Despite the bizarre events, Alice rarely expresses strong emotions. Her reactions are often muted, which makes it hard for the reader to engage with her experience.”
The driving force behind this criticism is, perhaps, the emphasis in modern Western novels on emotional exploration. But Alice is a Victorian upper-class girl, stiff-upper-lipped and confident of the social rules, even as they are buffeted by the absurdity of the Wonderland creatures. She behaves entirely consistently with her background and class. Emoting would be entirely wrong. This failure to grasp the nuances of the setting underlies another critical comment:
“The symbolic meaning of Alice’s experiences is not fully developed. The lack of thematic depth makes the story feel somewhat superficial.”
I would beg to differ. First, this is a book for children, so too much symbolic depth would be inappropriate. Second, and more important, the fundamental symbolism is abundantly clear in the repeated challenges to Alice’s sense of order by the other characters.
This leads me to my conclusion about the app. If the tool makes interpretations that no human would, this is no surprise. The AI does not “understand” a story. It merely follows algorithms that look for patterns of word associations its database says are probable. The net result, in the present stage of development of the technology, is to default to tropes. Though it is an impressive leap to be able to (more or less) follow a narrative arc over tens of thousands of words, my judgement is that the release of this tool is premature. More work will be needed to give the tool a better grasp of context and psychology.
Neil MacDonald Author 