PHOTO PROMPT © Brenda Cox

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It was illegal for her to be in Shenzhen let alone to time shift into the past. Fortunately, she had enough power left to transmogrify into a western tourist and evade her pursuers. As she boarded the double-decker street bus, she did attract some male attention, but for predictable reasons.

He kept a home in the Bantian district where her transportation was heading. If Dr. Kao didn’t have the technology in 1998 to fix her, she’d have to spend the next thirty years pretending to age to reach her present. Could she warn her former self to avoid the accident?

Once again it is time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 18 August 2023 edition of Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image above as a prompt to create a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

I looked up red double-decker busses in Asia trying to get a handle, adjusting my search when I saw the bus pulled power from overhead cables like a San Francisco street car. Too many countries to choose from so I selected the city of Shenzhen which is just north of Hong Kong. Looking up the city’s history didn’t provide much, but I had an idea, another of my “mysterious person on the run” stories.

Over the years on this blog, I’ve written a story fragments about a woman who fell into time and another about a woman who, thanks to a nuclear accident, had to be recreated using synthetic DNA (she was published in a three-part tale called Woman Under Repair).

I blended that into my current missive and heavily fictionalized Dr. Charles K Kao just because I needed someone who might “fix” my nameless heroine.

I borrowed the title from actress Drew Barrymore’s autobiography (written with Todd Gold) called Little Girl Lost.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

To read more of my work, try the SciFi/Fantasy novelette ICE.

At the end of time, the world is hot and men travel the vast oceans in merchant sailing ships. Captain Ki-Moon Yong of the Star of Jindo has discovered a new horror at the bottom of the world. Can he and the Star escape disaster long enough to warn a disbelieving world?