PHOTO PROMPT © Lily

John finally crested the alabaster rim of the crater after hours of climbing under the cold sun. He was sweating and couldn’t catch his breath in the thin atmosphere. He sat down on the edge looking downward, his chest heaving.

He said at last, “All wrecked.”

He’d been hoping that the Crater Base had at least one working spacecraft left, but they were crumbled and lying across each other as if they were toys mangled by an angry child.

“I’ll never get home,” he lamented looking upward at pale stars.

Then a voice came from one of the derelicts. “Welcome.”

It’s Wednesday and time again to participate in this week’s edition of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 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.

Cover image for my novel “A Wobblegong and His Boy”

I decided not to take a literal approach to the photo this week and reimagined it as a large crater on a Mars-like planet containing the wrecks of several derelict spaceships. I left the story a mystery because I like that sort of thing.

To read other tales based on the prompt or to contribute one of your own, visit inlinkz.

As you may have read HERE, my new YA science fiction novel A Wobblegong and His Boy became the number one best seller in Amazon’s Children’s Aliens Books AND Children’s Space Exploration. These values change daily so as of this writing, it’s number three in both categories which is still pretty good. Waiting for more ratings and reviews to come in but what the book has so far is encouraging.

I’ve been interviewed on video three times so far. Here’s one you may not have seen before from Dominic de Souza’s LegendFiction YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VbDK-adMmE