Mask

I have never worn a physical mask to hide my face and features.  And neither have I ever worn my true face.  Or shown my true feelings.

I despise humanity, I would love to see it fade back into its own filth, I rue the day I was thrust into this jumped-up primordial dust.  If my finger was on “the button,” I would not hesitate to press it firmly and decisively.

Yet I walk the world smiling, gracious and charming; no one would know of my secret sneer. my disdain of all of “creation”. 

I attend work, perform diligently and with due purpose, even sometimes going beyond my remit; I sit at pub bars and talk to the staff, to fellow drinkers too, as if I were one of them; I married and had children as if I were just like anybody else (easily the most difficult role I have played). 

All the while dreaming of society’s rot and decay; all as I wait to unveil my true self.  I smile inside thinking about it, that day when I will shock everybody I know by revealing my true being.  When I reduce them all with my words, send them snivelling away ashamed to be human.  Turn them into the grovelling dogs I know them to be.

And that’s when I will break the seal and send us all to hell.

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Written for the Light and Shade Challenge from the following picture prompt and the written prompt, from Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

 

Courtesy of WikiMedia creative commons

100 Words: The Endless Tower

Every floor is different, each level a new age or style.  Onwards and upwards forever.

A short lift ride or stair stride and you enter another world, speak to people in a different parlance, in outdated or futuristic slang.

I made it my task to go ever up and witness the futures of mankind, to see what mysteries we would solve and how far from the tower we would venture. 

Everything was amazing; the further I went, the madder, the more brilliant it got.  Even on the last occupied floor. 

Beyond that was quiet nothingness with no trace of why. 

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

PHOTO PROMPT – © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

An InLinkz Link-up

100 Words: If Only Everything Was This Easy

I stood dumbfounded at the ordinariness of the scene.  These were the most dangerous books and artefacts from magical history yet there they were placed neatly on regular old roller racking, just as I had seen in all the ignorant museums and libraries of the world.

I’d expected something older here, fixed wooden shelves, cobwebs, a damp mustiness, not to mention charms to keep me away. 

I should have been pleased much more quickly, really; this made my job much easier.

I found my aisle, turned the wheel and took what would destroy everything.

I still cannot believe my luck.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

PHOTO PROMPT – © Claire Fuller

250 Words: Tempus Fugit

Oh yes, son, Time really does, quite literally, fly.  He lives in the Moon, you see, because, well, he is The Man in the Moon.  And he flies it around the earth, causing the earth to rotate and makes time flow.

That’s right, yes.  It’s all true, your father wouldn’t lie!

There’s a hollow in the middle, you see, that’s where he sleeps during the day.  Then, at night, well, at dusk - in the gloaming he be a’roaming, if you...
no?
Okaay, well as the sun is going down, Time gets up because, well, at that point the earth is slowing down, so he has to get into his cockpit, start up the motors and get everything going again so we can build up momentum again over night and have another day.

Of course it makes sense. 

It’s a bit like a bike, winding up and letting go, there’s an invisible band linking the Moon and Earth, how else would the earth rotate?  How else would we get day and night?

Oh... you’ve covered it at school. 

And you prefer the story of Ra, anyway?  Yes, I like that too, poor old Ra, but you asked if time really flew, so I told you about Time living in the…

Oh.  I’ve already told you the story of Mother and Moon, thus contradicting this sorry tale.  And Saturn starting time, too? 

Well, there are different tales, different myths, my boy.  Perhaps we shall eventually work through them all.

Sleep well.

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Written for the Light and Shade Challenge from the written prompt: "Tempus Fugit."

100 Words: As Moon is my Witness

The gaps in the clouds looked like giant bats ready to swoop; the branches great webs, their masters hidden; and, between them, Moon shone- a spotlight following me, an eye watching, staring into my soul and reviewing my sin.

I stumbled, felt the spiders, sprung from their hiding places, crawling over me; felt the air from the bats as they swooped, waiting for the command to strike; saw Moon’s glare as he accused me, made me view what I’d done again and again.


I was found in the morning a quivering wreck and confessed to my crime before being asked.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

PHOTO PROMPT -© Madison Woods

An InLinkz Link-up

Modifiers

They say it’s very easy to get horribly addicted once you start getting them but I never thought it would happen quite so quickly.

Like most of us I started with something (well, a couple of somethings) genuinely necessary but liked it so much it led to another and another.

The first were most definitely necessary, really quite vital, in fact.  I lost the use of my right hand during the war and had the damaged parts replaced with machinery that made me stronger than I had been before.

This allowed me to fight on with only one more short pause- a tiny piece of shrapnel later taking all sight in my left eye.  Until, once again, I was restored with state-of-the-art robotics, my eyesight not just becoming vastly clearer (so much so that they had to do my right eye too) but allowing me to zoom in and out.  Before long I was up ahead of my unit scouting the territory and warning of dangers.

In those inconceivably, or so it seemed at the time, long periods of downtime between actions (most of war is waiting) I would sometimes sit and think about other parts of my body I could wound and have born anew.  Because it is such a huge rush to have replacements, to get upgraded, I can’t tell you just how amazingly wonderful it is.


When peace came I didn’t think for even a second that I would carry on modifying my body but, as I struggled with both finding work and settling into civilian life, I found myself with more and more free time to miss the thrill of discovering what new parts could do.

So when modifications started to go commercial, I quickly signed up when they asked for volunteers to test new ones.

Before long I could run faster than Bolt, lift more than Geoff Capes, see further than a sniper.  It made me incredibly happy for a time, boosted my confidence.  I was a poster boy for the new world, forged and fast forwarded by war.

But it never really took off.  It kept going but never became huge.  There was always a steady trickle of the enhanced- those by complete and independent choice and those modified by the military, both for strategy and to patch up those wounded in the wars- it continued.

Those who’d been modified were looked down on and, after the company discarded me, I found it completely impossible to get hired.

You can guess the rest, for now it is our turn to live.

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

Instead of the quotation I suggest you write a piece without adverbs. 

Sorry I've written and blogged this incredibly late.  Sorry, also, that I misread the prompt so horrifically too.  I read it as a piece about adverbs.  Probably I misread it because I was reading an article about robots at the same time, which I fused to what I thought this prompt was to create this story.

100 Words: Where it took me

The extra circle that looked like a No Smoking sign bugged me so much I had to stop looking up.  I knew it was still there, though, could feel it on my head searing through my hair, heating my brain and making me madder.

I tried not going in that room but could hear it calling to me, mocking me from afar.  Even out in the grounds its distant call reached me still.  Even on holiday, countries away.

So I got them to build the scaffold; went up there myself, touched it. 
Now I’m a plasterer three hundred years ago.

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Written for Friday Fictioneers from the following picture prompt:

 

An InLinkz Link-up