100 Words: I am Radiant

I am today, though I wasn’t yesterday- or any day before.  The change came this morning soon after dawn.  The sun, as it came over the houses across the street, poured beautifully through my window and made me stir.  As I woke, I yawned.  The sun saw, thought I was bored by its display and shot me with its rays.

Now I glow brightly.  It’s not so great.  With light and heat.  I’m worried that I will blind someone and set something on fire.  

“Oh great Sun, oh Helios, oh Ra, how can I make amends and stop being radiant?”

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Written for 100 Word Challenge #411 on Velvet Verbosity; the prompt was the word Radiant.

100 Words: Crooks and Shank

It was a horrid, murky place to work, nothing was ever clean, it was always cold, the electrics were the worst, I’m surprised no one ever died; on site that is, most there were already dead given we harvested human corpses and took out their souls.  Corpse parts for the doctors, to keep the live ones living; souls for the Archives of Everything and Encyclopedia of Everyone.  Crooks forced it out and I, Shank, caught it, got it in the bottle.  Someone else further down catalogued and stored and whatnot- we were just the practical people, the Corpselarks of Afterwards.

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Version 2:

It was a horrid, murky place to work, nothing was ever clean, it was always cold, the electrics were the worst, I’m surprised no one ever died; on site that is, most there were already dead given we harvested human corpses to take out their soul.  Some parts went to keep the live ones living but the soul was for the Archives of Everything and Encyclopedia of Everyone.  Crooks forced it out and I, Shank, caught it, got it in the bottle.  Others further down catalogued and stored and whatnot- we were just the practical people, the Corpselarks of Afterwards.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

PHOTO PROMPT - Copyright Ted Strutz

An InLinkz Link-up

100 Words (x2): Based on your preferences and What I have done

Based on my preferences, that intricate web of songs I have bought, or simply listened to, films, television programmes I have watched, organisations, people, poets, writers, actors, celebrities I have liked or re-tweeted... based on a list, cross-referenced with others, they have removed me from society as a threat.

In one night they took us all and brought us to a place where we would be together, yet completely apart- each of us receiving a cuboid of desolation in which to wonder why we never heeded the warnings.. while each of us, separately, learns to think and to love unconditionally.

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As I crossed the platform I didn’t feel at all guilty for what I had done- neither in my conscience, or even in the legal sense.  As the planks creaked under my feet, warped from the strain of carrying the deeds of my forebears, I felt light despite the sound.

To think, and to love, unconditionally.  The rights things, the right people.  These are things I could learn but not things I could do.  Based on my preferences I found myself inside, away from society.  Inside, away from society, I became a threat to it.

I’ll smile when I hang.

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Note: Based on your preferences was inspired by an article I read on the Guardian app about the Vinyl's difficult  comeback, written by John Harris.  In it, a manufacturer of vinyl who grew up in East Germany, when talking about Spotify, says that such mechanisms as the world wide web would have been the Stasi's wet dream, that a list of preferences might one day be used to label people as threats.  This idea, with added Nineteen Eighty-Four, created that.  What have I done was an idea going nowhere, so I turned it into a sequel.

You have to laugh, though, haven’t you?

There are many bad things about suddenly having with x-ray vision; high up there being that you cannot see books.  I was happily in the middle of Gormenghast when it happened.  I had to wait an agonisingly long time to discover the conclusion (though, largely, it should be admitted, because I stubbornly refused the audiobook). 

Artworks have become a mess as all versions and corrections, and sometimes another painting altogether, appear together with the finished piece.  I am forced to see something unintended which, though interesting in its own right, has, quite simply, taken a former pleasure away.

So too with football.  I could go and sit among the sedentary skeletons to watch the athletic ones but without a ball it has become a horrific parody of Spot the Ball.

On and on I could complain about it destroying one thing or another- like not being able to see food; I can find it with my lovely clear cutlery (or less clear hands) but find it difficult to eat without help.  But I don’t like to complain because I really don’t think this is as bad as being blind, yet it does still cause horrible and painful problems- those things beyond everyday complications like trying to get from A to B when walls and other obstacles blend into your path.

Because one of the worst things about being afflicted with x-ray vision is that I find it near impossible to recognise anyone.  I’ve had to try and rely on voice and gait recognition, the configuration of metal objects within clothes and pockets or constellations of piercings and fillings.  Indeed, Samantha’s braces is sometimes the only way I can tell the twins apart.

The worst thing, though, is trying to be intimate.  Not being able to properly see my wife’s face, arms, or any part of her skin, means that I often press too hard or stop short when I try to stroke her face or arms, or kiss her lips.  I feel emasculated in the way that she has to lead that part of our life. 

Again, there are worse hardships than this.  And, in time, I should learn.  But I miss her face.  All faces.  I feel like all I look at is death.  But you have to laugh, though, haven’t you?  To find the comic side in everything.  To imagine Funnybones rather than The Evil Dead, and to learn to enjoy life once more, in this new way that I see it.  If I can’t find it, I’ll go insane.

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Written for Light and Shade Challenge from both the following picture prompt and the written prompt, which was  "If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane" - Jimmy Buffet

 

 Image courtesy of Wiki Commons taken by Nevit Dilmen and used under the Creative Commons Agreement 

Return to the Days Before

She bought the flower stickers because they remind her of the time before the dragons came, blowing the beach to glass, the land to ashes.  The flowers she knew from her adolescence, and are a way to take her mind, at least, back. 

She was on the beach when they arrived.  Not the hottest day, but dry and bright with only the slightest breeze.  Her circle of friends had normally loved to find a little crater in the dunes to make their own.  The beauty of the day had probably saved them then, as they’d had no need for shelter from sun or wind. 

Instead, they’d sat atop the dunes and gained a good view of the approaching storm that had been forecast only by rumour; and a wonderful view of the first bursts of fire emanating from it. 

They felt the heat, heard the screams. 

And ran.

They, ran, then cycled, home, ignoring every sight on the way, intent only on getting far enough away.

She served as a dragonslayer after, has seen too much for one lifetime.  Left tired but victorious, she seeks ways to link up with the before time we are trying to restore the world to.  Her bicycle and those stickers are her latest attempt.

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Written for Flash! Friday - the challenge was to use the setting of a Beach along with the following picture prompt:

 

Old Woman. CC2.0 photo by Giorgio Grande.

100 Words: After what had happened

There was more blood than she thought there’d be.  But then she’d fired more bullets than she’d planned to.  Something took over after the first shot.  The physical action as well as its result were both more satisfying than she’d anticipated.

She threw the gun into the boat with all the strength she could muster, and a little more mustered by adrenalin.  It went right through and, smiling, she watched him and the boat sink.

To think the idiot thought she’d go out with him a second time.  Not after what happened the first time.  Not after that.  No way.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

PHOTO PROMPT – Copyright – Georgia Koch

I actually came up with the first lines this morning while in the bathroom, before seeing the prompt.  I then worked the prompt in as a way of continuing the story - so thank you, Rochelle for the help.  

The first thing I thought about, though, when seeing the prompt was Richard Parker and a terrible rhyme I wrote after learning about the Richard Parkers who have been cannibalised.

An InLinkz Link-up

100 Words: A Childhood Memory

My first memory is of a group of cows feasting on one of their own, Dad laughing as they frenziedly ripped their own teeth out.

I have few other memories of animals.  Most the same as everyone else (pets going postal) because, before I left infant school, they’d all been lost to the plague they could only stop among humans. 

Those cows will forever be my abiding memory of creatures other than humans.  Although I know they weren’t like that before, cow prints still hold a certain power over me.  Because when they finished, they chased us.  And ate Dad.

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Written for 100 Word Challenge #410 on Velvet Verbosity; the prompt was the word Feasting.

100 Words: On the ship between the trains

On the ship between the trains, I thought about how we must be sailing right through Awdry’s imagined island; that, if it existed, we would rather be crossing it within a carriage that had a life of its own, pulled by an accident prone talking locomotive. 

Lost in dreams, I saw the southwest corner before me, my namesake, James, puffing along the mainline, whistling a greeting to us.  But, alas, it was not real, just a flight of fancy remembered from my formative years.

At Douglas I disembarked heavy of heart.  I was not looking forward to the return trip.

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Written for the Light and Shade Challenge from the following picture prompt:

 

Image courtesy of Wiki Commons and in the Public Domain

100 Words: Unthink ... Begin.

To think the answer had been there all along, right above my head, passing over me every day.  My brain had become a melted mess from too little sleep and too many thoughts and ideas bouncing around and into one another.  It felt like a hundred tiny men were always arguing.

Until that glorious morning when I looked up and saw what I must do to reset.

I sat on a bench nearby, phoned in, said I was running late, and spent the morning unthinking, removing every thought from my head. 

When I stood, I felt clear.

Then I began.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

PHOTO PROMPT – © Copyright Jean L. Hays

An InLinkz Link-up

100 Words: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men

Once, a wizened old man would hide in the roots of an equally gnarled, though much older, tree.

Passers-by would either ignore him (or perhaps miss him entirely), treat him with disdain (often very rudely) or seek to help him (offering food or alternative (warmer, drier) shelter). 

He would ignore the first sort (or miss them in turn), curse the second and reward the third, bidding them not to tell of what he had done.

In this way the wizard sought to rule, in the short term, by fear and, in the long term, by the survival of the kindest.

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Written for 100 Word Challenge #408 on Velvet Verbosity; the prompt was the word Once.  

The title ultimately comes from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, though I thought I would instead use a full line from the poem he took it from (partly as a way of reading it for the first time).  This was also very much inspired by one of the other stories written from this prompt - Number Two on the list below is also very good).

100 Words: An old man's secret

An old man now, Richie walked down the stairs he’d abandoned as a child, his assistant helping, walking in front.  

At the bottom he entered the arena where his friends would come to become wealthy young Woody Guthries and stage great wars with hot rocks and sticks.

Until the day Stevie died.  They buried him where he lay and claimed he’d never arrived that day.  

He was still missing, no policeman had ever hypothesised the reality.

Now, with only Richie left, the secret would safely be kept forever.  Unless… 

Across the arena Stevie stared blankly, smiling as only skulls do.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

PHOTO PROMPT – Copyright -Björn Rudberg

An InLinkz Link-up