Tag: 100 word stories

#Friday Fictioneers — The Scourge

Genre: Dystopian
Word Count: 100

THE SCOURGE

After the floods and gales, pestilence descended, and you had to pretend you were ill or get eaten. It began with the homeless and the already forgotten, those without symptoms and too aimless to feign the tell-tale cough.

Not so Vince, with his filched pot of pepper and his begging tin filled with dried butter beans from the dumpster. I remember his contagion act all too well. The raw eyes and the pepper sneeze. The butter bean chest rattle.

I never let on. Being a vegetarian with allergic rhinitis, why would I? We were the last two survivors, the obsolete.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image copyright (c) Roger Bultot

                

Friday Fictioneers — Beyond the Veil

Genre: Tragedy
Word Count: 100

BEYOND THE VEIL

Alice’s bridal veil hangs at the window, curtaining her off from the world.

Beneath a silvery moon her seducer had sung of love and sent her heart sailing over the rooftops, along with her brain.

If only clouds and rain had sheeted the moon in gloom that night, Alice would’ve hung on to her brain and her panties.

If only she’d worn a straitjacket for her hen night, she could have settled for mediocrity.

If only her fiancé had sent her heart sailing over the rooftops as her seducer had done.

Forever after, “if only” will be her daily mantra.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image copyright (c) Gah Learner

Friday Fictioneers — Dressed Trout

Genre: Dark humour
Word count: 100

DRESSED TROUT

“You, madam, have fatally overstepped the mark.”

“Leb be bout!”

Silly old trout. Dose of y’ own medicine. Enter the zone of a faceless nobody without a voice, hands tied by The System. …Except now you’re at the mercy of My System. “Madam, you called me ‘boy’ again today and shouted at me in front of the customers. My job is to stack the freezers, not spend hours helping you choose wine so all my ice cream melts.”

“Bolice! Boy’s a bycho.”

“Too right, I’m a psycho. Now an officially jobless one with infinite time on his hands for torture.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo Prompt: image copyright (c) Liz Young

Friday Fictioneers — Memory Stoked

The writing of my latest tome is taking longer than I expected, thus my urge to take a breather and take part in this week’s Friday Fictioneers challenge. Many thanks to Sandra Crook for the photo prompt and to our dynamo of a host, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

My apologies for posting yet another excerpt from my novel Counting Magpies (last seen disappearing through a black hole into another universe, otherwise known as the publisher’s submissions backlog!).

Genre: Speculative fiction
Word Count: 100

~MEMORY STOKED~

Janice has never lived in a city akin to Warsaw, or witnessed multitudinous fire-gutted buildings, some with bodies inside. I trudge after her, weighted by a memory.

When I was seven years old the Mafia burnt down my favourite ice-cream parlour—some kind of turf war—with my friend, her older sister, father, and grandmother inside. Afterwards, I’d obsessed over visions of gallons of ice-cream melting into a rainbow stream that ran all the way out the door and down the road to forever, not to hell but to paradise. This fantasy was better than imagining the family incinerated alive.

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To read other Friday Fictioneers’ stories for this week, or to add a 100-word story of your own, please click on the blue frog below.

 

Friday Fictioneers — Imprisoned

Many thanks to Rochelle for using my husband’s spiderweb picture as this week’s photo prompt for Friday Fictioneers. Some of my blog followers and visitors will already have seen this picture, which accompanied my New Year’s Day Monday Morning #Haiku 181 — Spider, thus to avoid spiderweb overkill, I’ll just post a downsized reminder of the original to go with my 100-word story for today.

My apologies for not having participated in Friday Fictioneers since last October. Throughout November I took time off from blogging to concentrate on penning the first 50K words of my latest tome for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and succeeded in reaching the necessary target to qualify as a winner. December was all about catching up with jobs and squeezing in a bit of writing when time allowed. January was a slow starter, but I’m now on the homeward stretch of the first draft of my novel, with about 15-20K words to go.

So here you have it, a trimmed snippet from my work-in-progress Twicers, which is a satire set in the not-too-distant future. My main character, Japeth, is loosely based on  my MC in The Parable Teller, a short story of mine published in the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual, 2011.

Please be warned that the excerpt contains a profanity but, under the circumstances, I’m sure you’ll agree my MC is being most restrained! Also, note that I use the singular of the word “heel”, as Japeth only has one leg.

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IMPRISONED

By now, his eyes had adapted to the false twilight afforded by a row of high-up windows at the rear of the workshop, each one opaque with grime and laced over with spiderwebs.

With the dogs at his heel, he conducted a search of the workshop and nearly tripped over a tin bucket. Toilet rolls were stacked on the shelf above, with a piece of corrugated cardboard propped up against them. The cardboard had painted on it in white the words “COURTESY OF THE MANAGEMENT”.

“Shit!” said Japeth, which seemed apt. Nobody needed nine toilet rolls for a short stay.

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To read other Friday Fictioneers’ stories for this week, or to add a 100-word story of your own, please click on the blue frog below.