Tag: 100 word stories

Friday Fictioneers — What to believe?

lucy-sol

Darryl stared me straight in the eye. “He swam off with a mermaid on Christmas Day.”

I jotted two words on my pad — Deluded? Denial? — and drew a circle around them both. “Wasn’t it rather cold?”

“His heart was frozen anyway. No job. Mum didn’t want him anymore.”

“So what did the mermaid have to offer?”

“A new life.”

If that’s what you want to call “suicide”, I thought.

Darryl slid a photograph across the table. It was of some clothes neatly folded at the end of a jetty and a silver tailfin sticking up out of the water nearby.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo prompt: image (c) Lucy Fridkin

Friday Fictioneers — Boy Enfolded

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Björn Rudeberg

She wears a green satin dress, the cello cocooned in the shimmering folds of its skirt. Her skin is flawless ivory. The waves of her chestnut hair tease her back as she draws the bow across the strings. Elgar’s cello concerto.

He’s eight-years-old. Serious. His eyes are like saucers behind his round glasses as he sits too close to the television, in awe of her. There’s no delineation between her and the music; they are one and same, both spellbinding in their beauty. She’s nine years his senior, but too perfect to be anybody’s older sister.

1994. Natalie Clein. His first love.

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In 1994, cellist, Natalie Clein won BBC Young Musician of the Year at the age of 17. Here is a video of her playing a the 3rd Movement of the Elgar cello concerto 14 years later in 2008.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo prompt: image (c) Björn Rudberg

 

Friday Fictioneers — Intergalactic Souvenirs

PHOTO PROMPT © Claire Fuller

Aliens visited Earth once, during the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period. Along with the official samples collected for scientific analysis, one of them smuggled some souvenirs back home as toys for its 5-year-old squirmling.

All quite harmless, it thought, until a beetle crawled out of a piece of deadwood and infected the squirmling with a deadly virus that wiped out every living creature on the planet.

In a couple of centuries from now, human astronauts will visit the star Wolf 1061 and discover exoplanet 1061c is dead. Then they will excavate and find a 2016 copper-plated coin from Earth.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo prompt: image © Claire Fuller

Friday Fictioneers — How To Suffer An Art Attack

Copyright -John Nixon

Welcome to the Annual Nutsville Art Show!

Our next exhibit is titled Keyed-in by Eccentric Anon.

This is an incredibly powerful living sculpture, albeit a possible one-day wonder. As you might observe, the artist has rushed headlong into his creation and met with a dreadful accident. Whether this was intentional or not, we may never find out. It’s not every day that an upright piano consumes a downright idiot.

The instrument’s tuner has just confirmed that the only Chopin to be performed on this particular piano will involve the surgical extraction of said artist from the keyboard.

No photos, please.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo prompt: image (c) John Nixon

Friday Fictioneers — Boom!

monsters-dmm

Jack and Tina’s parents argued constantly about anything and everything. Tina hid in corners and quivered. Jack found different ways to blank the sound and escape to make-believe worlds.

Today he dived amidst corals and schools of neon fish, searching for shipwrecks filled with treasure and pirate bones, so he could buy a peaceful island in the sun and escape there with his sister.

Tomorrow night, when Tina went to her friend’s place for a sleepover, he’d don a tin helmet and ear defenders, lay dynamite under the house, and pretend he was a demolition expert just like his father.

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Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories
Photo prompt: image (c) Douglas M. MacIlroy