Month: July 2016

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FFfAW Challenge – Week of July 26, 2016

75th Challenge

Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers

Week of 07-26 through 08-01-2016

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This week’s photo prompt is provided by Louise with the Story Teller’s Abode.

Guide for Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers

1. A prompt photo will be provided each Tuesday to be used as a base to your story. Please include photo prompt with your story.

2. Linking for this challenge begins on Tuesday and runs to the following Monday evening.

3. Please credit photo to photographer.

4. The story word limit is 100 – 150 words (+ – 25 words). Please try and stay within this limit

 

He surveyed the little patch of ground he optimistically called a garden. He’d never had anything to call his own. Now, for good or worse, he had a garden.

But what use, they’d cried, for a garden in which nothing grows? This wasn’t entirely true. Some neighboring gardens flourished before the drought.

Others abandoned their gardens as it got hotter. Dryer. Talked to them. Shaded them from the mid-day sun. Cleaned their leaves against harmful pests.

If only it had worked on the crabby little kids three gardens down. Still, the drought was evenly cruel to all. The little kids hadn’t come for weeks and, to his surprise, he missed them. Chattering like magpies. Squawking like jays. Running around like that funny chicken.

Tomorrow, he thought, will be my last day. He could no longer bear witness to their deaths when he’d so lovingly cultivated each tiny seed.

At dawn, his plot shone like an enchanted garden amid the wasteland. All bright flowers, shiny leaves, hints of berries peeking out from the foliage. A robin warbled.

A smile crossed his lips as he walked away.

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JSW Prompt 7-28-2016

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Feel free to add your own response to the prompt in the comments and I will post it on my blog.

Everybody needs a name, you say, but do they? When one lives in the shadows there is no need for names. Living in shadows is a solitary profession; what need of a name when there is no one to speak the syllables? No one to understand or know or care. You want to call me something, call me Silence and that will be my truth. Call me Shadow and that will be my truth. Call me nobody and in that truth I will drown.

I used to have a name, used to belong, used to be a creature of the light, but one step into darkness begins the fall. Sometimes, in brief flashes upon waking or sleeping, I remember those days, but they are not mine any longer. They belong to another, to the one who filled the vacuum of my space.

Yesterday, I went down to the dark river to drown, but how can one drown if one is nobody, nothing, memory? There is no escape from the shadows. In here, one is always drowning.

If, in the dead of night, you feel eyes upon you, know that is me. I have watched you for centuries and I will watch you centuries more. The Light will never escape the darkness, just as the darkness will never escape the light. So who are we, these creatures of the Dark and Light?

I am dark and hate and fear and death. I am the monster under your bed, the feel of eyes on your back, the sliver of darkness piercing each soul in the light. Teasing, tempting, oh subtle and beautiful shadows.

I am war and torture and despair and plague. I am you looking out from innocent eyes. I am the dirt in your soul just waiting to be free.

I live in shadow. No one sees me. I don’t need a name.

Do you?

 

 

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Friday Fictioneers 7-22-2016

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This week’s retread request is from Feivel Mousewitz Gayer.

They came into the harbor a little after dawn on a grey morning in late November. Nobody saw them but the Statue of Liberty and she wasn’t telling. It was her job, after all, to accept all. Tired. Hungry. Huddled masses. They fit all the descriptors perfectly so she let them come.

Bumping against her shore, the battered boat lingered a moment before drifting back out to sea, vanishing in a flash of rising sunlight.

They drifted to her as so many had before, lost, tired, alone, enfolded into her loving embrace.

At last, home.

 

 

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Quote For The Day 7-27-2016

“Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you’re going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you’re in.”

― Ridley Pearson