Tag: Friday Fictioneers

Friday Fictioneers — A Rare Specimen

For this week’s Friday Fictioneers (photo prompt copyright © Jellico’s Stationhouse) I couldn’t resist adapting another excerpt from my latest, as-yet unpublished novel Counting Magpies.

Those of you who read my earlier excerpt “Snow Baby” will already have met Morag. In today’s piece, she arrives in the unfamiliar city of York in the middle of the night after a journey of 300 kilometers on an antiquated bicycle that decides to self-destruct on a cobbled street outside the home of the centenarian cleric and one-time Dean of York Minster.

Genre: Dystopian speculative fiction
Word Count: 100

A RARE SPECIMEN

I sit there stunned with the bicycle lying beside me.

A man thrusts open a window above me and cries out. “Hell fire! What’s the good Lord delivered to my doorstep? Some up-skelled and paggered lass, by the looks of it.”

I haul myself to my feet and stand there, with my hands on my hips, forgetting about the size of my belly. “Up-skelled and paggered? Are you insulting me?”

“No, I’m observing that you’ve fallen off your bicycle and look all done-in. …Oh, I see it now. It’s so many years since I’ve encountered anyone in the family way.”

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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 — Adrift Alone

Genre: Haibun (Japanese-style poetic prose)
Word count: 100

~~ADRIFT ALONE~~

She sits at the end of the jetty penning a tanka poem to her lost love. Earlier attempts bob about on the seawater inside screwed up balls of paper; they slowly unravel into sodden single sheets with the words sucked out of them.

He sails away,
the figurehead of his boat,
captain of nothing.
In deeps, beyond redemption,
sink the wrecks of human dreams.

He floats becalmed in a rubber dinghy amidst flotsam. The sun beats down on him and cooks his brain, as he composes his epitaph.

Here lies a shark that ate a fool who died alone.

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Photo Prompt: copyright © Fatima Fakier Deria
Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories

Friday Fictioneers — This green and pleasant land

PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll

Genre: Political Satire
Word Count: 100

~~THIS GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND~~

April 1st, 2019, farmers across England awoke to a most baffling sight. Identical slate-grey houses had sprouted in the middle of their set-aside fields overnight. To add to the mystery, all the weeds and wildflowers had disappeared, along with the fresh spring foliage from the trees.

High voltage electrified spiked fences surrounded the properties, thwarting any attempts to gain access. On the padlocked main gates to each of the properties hung an upside down Union Jack with a V-sign above it and the words LET THE FUN BEGIN.

Midday passed. The houses stayed put. It was no April fool’s joke.

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Photo Prompt: copyright © J Hardy Carroll
Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories

Friday Fictioneers — Measuring Up

Genre: Saucy fiction
Word count: 100

~~MEASURING UP~~

“Gosh, you’re tall!” people keep saying to me. How the hell would they like it, if I came up to them and said, “You’re short”?

At my first school, I was the shortest in the class. Then I swear that Mum put a cake in my lunchbox with similar magical ingredients to the one Alice ate in Wonderland, but without the shrinking antidote.

There’s this cute fellow at university, who calls me “his Amazonian beauty”. His mates tease him about conversing with my breasts.

Oh, they of limited imagination. He’s a mathematician and knows all about how to handle figures.

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Photo Prompt: Jennifer Pendergast
Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories

  

Friday Fictioneers — A Matter Of Perspective

Genre: General Fiction
Word count: 100

~~A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE~~

Whenever Seamus espied his ex-wife with that swanky billionaire, his legs gave out at the knees and he suffered an attack of vertigo.

In another life Seamus had been a violinist who played a Stradivarius, but now he dwelt under a railway arch, his home a cardboard box. Daily, he busked on a distressed fiddle. A few people tossed coins in his cap, but most passed him by, treating him as less than a bug.

Today, it dawned on him that bugs had been around a lot longer than humans had, and would probably outlive them all, including his ex-wife.

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Photo Prompt: copyright © Shaktiki Sharma
Friday Fictioneers: 100 word stories