PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook

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“Oh, come on, Grandpa. Gold Hill is such a famous street and Shaftesbury is so beautiful,” said twenty-year-old Nell. “Try to enjoy it. How often do you get to go on vacation?”

“I’m retired so every day is a vacation and you know how I hate old places, especially old crowded places.” Chandler’s eyes kept darting around as if following a cloud of wasps.

“Crowds? It’s early in the morning. There’s hardly anyone around.” Her eyes widened with realization. “You mean them? That’s just your imagination.”

“No, Nell, it’s not. I really do see ghosts and this place is loaded.”

It’s Wednesday and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 15 November 2024 edition of friday fictioneers. The idea is to use the image at the top as the inspiration for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

Once I learned the location and history of Gold Hill specifically and Shaftebury in general, I had to figure out what to do with all of that.

Old places probably have a lot of ghosts dating back many, many centuries. Imagine if you couldn’t help but see them all. It would make visiting such locations a real chore.

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

My science fiction short story “The Joker and the Thief” is now appearing in the anthology Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume II.

A man named Abyssian has cashed in on his natural ability to time travel by finding and selling rare objects lost to history to a mysterious pawnbroker named Sol. This time Sol wants what seems impossible. While history records that the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, it was supposedly recovered a few years later in Italy.

However, Sol reveals that only a forgery was found. The real painting was taken on board the Titanic and will be lost forever unless Abyssian recovers it. However, when he makes the attempt, history changes spectacularly and he accidentally “creates” his own adversary: The Jester.