100 Words: The Art Appreciator

Tonight he felt like Picasso and Caravaggio, tomorrow would be a Hyde Park stroll for Hadid, then beyond for Leighton.  No doubt a few sights, too, along the way.

For now the cat padded the West End, away from the late night drunks.  Since the Tube had started running all night at weekends, he had begun to ride into town and check out the galleries.  Not the insides, of course, that would be ridiculous, but the posters outside, to discover more.

Reflecting later: Caravaggio: too grim; Picasso: too strange.  "But I liked the photograph of the guy in the hat".

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Written for the 100 Word Challenge on Thin Spiral Notebook; the prompt was the word, Cat.

I've written a few cat stories; or stories with the word cat in them (one of them for Thin Spiral Notebook not long ago!)

100 Words: Safe Return

23rd July 1943: Returned safely from a successful raid, no casualties, minor damage.  Hamburg left behind in flames.  Warmed us all.  


It was years before I linked my memories of bombing with the annihilation we inflicted in return.  

We only saw buildings burning.  No civilians; no women or children.  

It was just.  It was not the same.

In a residential district rebuilt as commercial, weekend empty, I imagined the scenes.  

I saw the girl who had died in my arms, who I had sworn to avenge, dying again and again as the neighbourhood burned around me.  

Were we ever just?

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

PHOTO PROMPT © Lucy Fridkin

An InLinkz Link-up

100 Words: Safe Return

23rd July 1943: Returned safely from a successful raid, no casualties, minor damage.  Hamburg left behind in flames.  Warmed us all.  


It was years before I linked my memories of bombing with the annihilation we inflicted in return.  

We only saw buildings burning.  No civilians; no women or children.  

It was just.  It was not the same.


In a residential district rebuilt as commercial, weekend empty, I imagined the scenes.  

I saw the girl who had died in my arms, who I had sworn to avenge, dying again and again as the neighbourhood burned around me.  

Were we ever just?

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Written for the 100 Word Challenge on Thin Spiral Notebook; the prompt was the word, Justice.

100 Words: Magic Words

In some systems, sometimes requiring appropriate tools, the right words can do anything.  Sometimes they form rhymes, sometimes they are just a phrase, sometimes it is the true names of things that give you power over them. 

I’ve tried them all. 

So I was surprised to see an advert in the paper for a correspondence course and summer school in learning the words of magic.

I wrote off, attended in person to get the pronunciation correct.

I spat out snake oil and cracked weasel words but only found magic in the words spoken with someone met on the train home.

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Written for the 100 Word Challenge on Thin Spiral Notebook; the prompt was the word, Words.