At The End of Phaedra’s City

lisa's shoreline

PHOTO PROMPT © Lisa Fox

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

Phaedra the fugitive approached the shore. Not what she expected after the anguish she had suffered.

“Where are you?”

Her bare feet shuffled across the cool sand as she walked toward the odd collection of driftwood. A seagull hung suspended in the morning sky while another one “coo-cooed” on the beach.

Hot tears welled up behind her eyes but she refused to cry.

“You were supposed to tell me the secret.”

The dawn above turned off like a desk lamp. Phaedra saw alien stars across the dome and then something else. Her world was not a world, but a spaceship.

It’s Wednesday and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 1 November 2024 edition of Friday Fictoneers.

The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

I have an idea for a story that I’m playing with in my head. It starts in a vast city, a giant megalopolis and a rogue that for now I have named “Phaedra.” However, in her adventures, she discovers a startling secret. Her world is actually one of a multitude of colossal human habitats, each quite separate from another. They are linked together however, in a miles long spacecraft.

I know “lost” generation ships have been done before, but I’m hoping for something different. This tale is just me playing around with the concept.

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

My occult, steampunk western “Blood Trail” is now available in the anthology Zehlreg Augustus Grindstone’s Spectacular Western Oddity Emporium in both Kindle and paperback formats.

Former Idaho City Sheriff Bobby Bill Thornton has become the partner to Occult Investigating Detective E.E. (Emma Elizabeth) Durbin, joining her on her quest to find the monsters who have entered our world from another realm and return them from whence they came. This time, it’s a vampire in 1888 San Francisco, but that’s just the beginning.

Durbin and Thornton first appeared in my story “Wolf in the Wind” which can be found in the anthology Shoot the Devil.

I hope you’ll buy and read Emporium and also be so kind as to leave an honest review.

Thanks.

19 thoughts on “At The End of Phaedra’s City”

    • Thanks, Dawn. I finished the first draft on the longer story yesterday. The deadline isn’t until January, so there’s plenty of time to revise. That said, there is also plenty of time for other authors to submit stories better than mine.

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