Category: Writing

Friday Fictioneers — The Quick-frozen Bedouin Tribesman

PHOTO PROMPT - © Douglas M. MacIlroy

Settlers from the constellation Canes Venatici arrived on Earth five centuries too late for contact with humans. They’d expected to find a blue and green world teeming with wildlife, but instead found a place of eternal winter.

They searched for answers beneath the snow, as there was little on the surface to show that civilisation had ever existed.

In an excavated block of ice, a human male sat cross-legged. Flesh covered his bones and he had a black beard. Next to him rested a four-legged creature with thick lips, long eyelashes, an extended neck, and a hump on its back.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image © Douglas M. MacIlroy

Friday Fictioneers — Squirrel Barbecue

PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

That whiskery old hillbilly might own a ladder and hammer. He even has a few odd offcuts of wood knocking about, but he’s bone idle, except when it comes to gambling.

His missus scolds him rotten, “Ricky, when y’ gonna fix that bleeding ‘ole? Them squirrels are driving me nuts!”

And he yells back, “The only ‘ole needs fixing is that mouth of yours.”

I’m so grateful to him for letting me lodge in his attic; for providing such snug roof insulation as bedding for my offspring and yards of PVC wiring insulation for them to play tug of war.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image © Roger Bultot

Friday Fictioneers — Hoofs

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The shoeless boy with frayed trousers often rode the freight train to cattle market. He had a wall-eye and folks called him simple.

Perched atop, he played cowboy tunes on his harmonica to entertain the steers. As they rattled about and clomped their hoofs against containment, he imagined them dancing to his music.

One week, the train broke down and stayed broken. The boy sat for a while, tapping the spit out of his harmonica and thinking so hard the wrinkles in his forehead hurt. When nobody came, he released the steers but forgot to jump out of their way.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image © Jennifer Pendergast

Friday Fictioneers — Old Thingamybob

Lauren Moscato

You lived in terror of rats gnawing  through to your bones with their tombstone teeth as you slept.

One day, a man clattered down the street on stilts and cast some pennies into your hat. You said to him, “Seeing as you’re a giant, do us a favour, mate. Paint us a door and two windows high up on that wall over there.”

“I agree it’s unsightly.”  (he meant you, not the wall)

That night, your rheumy eyes deceived you. Above, you saw your doorway leading to salvation away from the meths bottle and rats, if only you had stilts.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100-word stories
Photo Prompt: image © Lauren Moscato

Friday Fictioneers — The Concert That Never Was

PHOTO PROMPT ©David Stewart

Every Sunday at dawn, March through to September, the Balderton Brass Band met up for a musical jamboree in a residential area. Their tone-deaf conductor, Jimmy ‘Spring Chicken’ Gilbert, delighted in aggravating his neighbours.

The instrumentalists — all octogenarians or nonagenarians — preferred to exercise their lungs from a sitting position, to put less stress on their knees.

“We will have a concert soon,” said Jimmy, just to keep the pensioners sweet until he’d stolen their souls.

On the bandstand, his tail twitched in time to the music and his retractable horns zizzed beneath his toupee. Off to the next town soon.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100-word stories
Photo prompt: image ©David Stewart