Monday 21 July 2014

250 Words: A nightmare in the corner of the room

I dreamt I was in bed trying to sleep- one of those vivid dreams you get sometimes after waking up early and drifting back to sleep.  I couldn’t sleep because there was a scratching sound coming from the corner of my bedroom.

I tentatively sat up to have a look.  Just as I caught sight of the creature it swivelled its entire body round to look back at me.  It was two foot high, green with a spiky head and long arms and as I stared in disbelief it grinned a huge, nasty grin full of sharp teeth.

While I thought about the fact I’d been watching Gremlins the day before it suddenly leapt across the room and landed on my chest knocking the air clean out of my lungs.  It then dropped onto its own chest, wrapped its arms around me and began to squeeze very tightly.

I tried my best to breathe but couldn’t move my chest muscles at all, the creature was holding on so strongly.  I began to panic, feeling my life ebbing away until…

I woke up, taking in a lungful of morning air in relief.  Though it felt like the creature was still on my chest, it was not, thankfully.  However, I looked across at the corner of my room, which, although it was also clear, I thought I could see… unless I was mistaken… I left my bed for a closer look… yes, claw marks in the wallpaper.

This was the first time.

Thursday 10 July 2014

250 Words: Strutting Simon

“Actions speak louder than words,” his father had advised when he became a teenager and asked about ways to impress girls.  And so the teen-boy developed a strut and a swagger as he tried to set himself out from the other boys parading the school corridors. 

It worked for a time, girls noticing this confidence in him and pausing by his locker to speak with him.  There were hands held, kisses between classes, kisses at the back of buses and cinemas.  He became a sort of a stud in these early glory years.  Nothing lasted but he didn’t mind at that point at all. 

As time wore on he did want more, though, as the girls quickly became women but he remained a boy, a preening peacock they grew sick of.

School discos and corridors gave way to pubs and clubs and he took his gait into town on a Friday night but no one took any notice so he took solace in drinking and dancing.  He tried to turn the latter into a new swagger, to match that of earlier days, but his discotheque coquetry got him nowhere.  He tried to turn his father’s advice on its head but the slaps showed his talk was worse than his walk.

Over the years he tried different tactics, slowly honing his vocabulary and sharpening his interpersonal skills- until the swagger disappeared and he became more like the person he’d been before he became a peacock, eventually finding someone to be with.


See also: ≤140 Characters, or Tweet Repeat: 14, from whence this was expanded.

Monday 7 July 2014

250 Words: Invitation to the game of pelota

It was lunchtime and he was eating his usual loaf as he wandered the streets aimlessly, ensuring at all times to keep it from the dog that would appear each day like clockwork and hover alongside while looking up hopefully.  Normally he would look about him to see what was happening on that particular day but keep always apart, as if in a bubble: watching and never taking part.  On this particular day, however, having glanced across at a heated argument between a stall owner and his customer, he was stopped in his tracks by a smiling face looking straight up at him.

“Would you like to play?” its mouth said in a welcoming, cheery sort of way.  A girl’s mouth- something he’d made a point of avoiding before now in the belief that all girls were as troublesome as his sisters.  “Typical,” he thought, “Let your guard down for a moment…” 

But let his guard down he did all the more as he took in the expression on this girl’s face.  And also because she was pretty in a way he had never noticed before.  That smile, though, on its own was such that he could not help but say, “Alright- looks fun.  How do you play?”

And as the ball flew back and forth along with the exchange of words, something began to change in them both.

A chance meeting became the start of a friendship that would flourish into a love that would survive against the odds.







Note: I went to a taster session one work lunchtime for a creative writing course I then never got round to signing up for.  We did an exercise where we were given postcards with pictures and tasked with coming up with a story for it.  I had, or at least saw, one bearing the painting Invitation to the Game of Pelota by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Pérez) and wound up later writing this.

Friday 4 July 2014

100 Words: The King in the Stone

Nothing about the outside of his statue remained the same as the day he had unveiled it. Where the original stone was exposed, it had been roughened by age while, elsewhere, lichen grew in different colours.

Inside the statue, the king was just the same as he had been in when imprisoned: full of pride and certain that someone would come forward to rescue him.  

The wizard who had trapped him told the king that one truly willing to see him rule again would be able release him.

About this release method, though, the wizard had told no one else.


Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:
PHOTO PROMPT, Copyright - Claire Fuller



Thursday 3 July 2014

250 Words: Improv aka Ramblings 9

Rabbie the Robot tells me things, from stories to amusing incidents that occurred in his past lives. He isn’t simply a small and cute clock but a repository of tales. Tales told not with lips but minds- conveyed onward through his mechanical workings into my head where I listen with delight, whether while sitting at my computer working or lying on my bed during the afternoon or shortly before bed.

There was the story about the man at the apocalypse, upset at the manner people were being divided between heaven and hell and how it contradicted the life he had had and the way it had been governed. “Where is the jury of my peers?” he asked as devils dragged him kicking and screaming to hell.

And one, a sort of bad rhyme, about a lost bear who made his life in a strange new world, eventually becoming its king for a year. Rabbie wasn’t sure, though, as to why his reign had ended: maybe a vicious overthrowing, potentially the end of his agreed tenure, perhaps his death. Rabbie does not know.

A sad-but-hopeful tale of a woman burning items collected during a recently ended relationship in order to find a way forward and to start to file away the still painful thoughts and memories.

And one about five schoolboys in trouble before their headmaster, who knows his is to punish but cannot help but respect the way they flooded the dreaded gym with a cunningly crafted system of pipes.


Note: In a more or less self-obsessed manner (or a way to create a story for a deadline), this stories of Rabbie's relate to ones I had already written.  I have linked each to its original.

This is Rabbie the Robot, a gift from wife a few birthdays back:


I also wrote about Rabbie here, including a tribute to Sorry I've Got No Head's Museum of Imagination.

Tuesday 1 July 2014

250 Words: Implants!

The introduction of brain chip implants was a good idea, well executed. 

We had sought to control the populace more for some time, or to control their behaviour- to stop various crimes once and for all.  This was the best way we could come up with.  Strange that the answer would lie in a long since forgotten memory of an old fantasy programme from our teenage years.

Such a simple idea, too- insert a chip into someone’s brain that will cause them intense pain if they start thinking about harming another human being.  Everything from assault to rape, murder and paedophilia- later robbery and fraud too, we threw in all crime eventually, they became a thing from history as we rolled the programme out across the nation.

The end result people could handle, even if they objected to the chip itself; and even if it meant we would empty the prisons, seeing as there was no more need for them. We covered this by increasing industry- more jobs and prosperity is always a winner.

Then we cranked things up a notch. The little silicon gems we’d made could control thoughts, not just lead them or train them.  Legitimate polls would remain so to the outside world.  People could believe we still lived in the old ways, that they could oppose us democratically, while we knew otherwise.

When we came to power we had aims, a vision of how we wanted the country to be. That dream has now been realised.


Note: I probably didn't realise it at the time of writing, but this one is annoyingly similar to The Removal of Free Will, it seems to me now.  The programme mentioned was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

100 Words: The rating thinking of the rum ration

The ratings lined up on the square, the salt wind scouring their faces.  It would be another day by the sea and not on it.  Steve’s mind wandered again, wondering when they’d set sail.

Not for the thrill of bobbing upon the ocean waves, though.  Steve wanted the drinks made famous by his brother’s tales.  His lips and tongue yearned for the rum ration’s tingle and the steaming hot chocolate they’d make at sea.  He thought about them constantly.

Too much.  He missed another turn- if he wasn’t careful Steve’d be confined to barracks and there’d be no beer tonight.


Written for 100 Word Challenge #384 on Velvet Verbosity; the prompt was the word Ratings.