Author Archives: James Pyles

Over the Edge

the edge

© KayllistisQuill.com

“Come to the edge, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. Morons!”

Twenty-three year old Zandar let his legs dangle over the building’s ledge and took in the view of downtown Vancouver. It was magnificent. It was the main reason he let his group of stoner friends lure him up here.

But now they were gone and he was alone.

Mike, Kari, James, and Humberto had all been high on “Elation”. They thought they could fly. They couldn’t. Zandar survived because he was their designated driver.

Fire and Paramedics were just arriving to mop up the mashed, bloody corpses.

This is the second in my three-part miniseries of flash fiction tales inspired by three photos at KayllistisQuill.com. See my first submission The Prayer for more details.

This story is exactly 100 words long.

The third and final submission in this series is The Magic Boat Ride, which is a children’s tale.

The Prayer

church

© KayllistisQuill.com

Gary was the only one in church. Everyone else was dead or changed. He was temporarily safe. They dared not enter a Holy place. But soon hunger and thirst would force him outside to forage. If he prayed hard enough, maybe God would have mercy. His wife and children were killed in the first attack, but his little granddaughter Lisa was changed and part of the Zombie horde. “Please save her, God.”

A voice whispered, “He did, Papa. That’s just my body, not me.” Gary wept as his family in Heaven reassured him they were safe and waiting for him.

I didn’t find any flash fiction writing prompts in my email inbox this morning, so I decided to go looking for some. I found three at KayllistisQuill.com. The instructions say to pick one of the three photos and write a 15-minute story. I decided to change things slightly and do the usual “100 words” limitation. I also decided to write three different stories based on the three photos presented. This is number one.

This story is exactly 100 words long.

The next story in today’s series is Over the Edge.

Taking Care of the Family

counterclock

Image: Odditymall.com

It worked. I changed everything for the better. Now my son Charles marries a hardworking, loving wife and mother instead of a depressed lay about. Now my son Chris makes his career decision five years earlier and gets a tenured position before the recession hits. Now my wife has that business she’s always wanted and the franchise money will make her rich. The Time Changer worked, but with one catch. Instead of me being a successful scientist, I’m a divorced drug addict, dying of lung cancer in the local hospital’s charity ward, a total human failure. It was worth it.

I’ve been writing so much flash fiction over the past few days, that when this idea popped up, I thought I’d take advantage. No prompt, no challenge. Just the way my head works.

The Friendly Dinosaur

railroad

© C.E. Ayr

Ginny remembered her Daddy as she stood overlooking the railroad yard. She was just three years old when he showed her that first train up close. It was moving slowly; large and stately, like a friendly dinosaur. The engineer looked down at her and smiled. She waved shyly back. She’d loved trains ever since. Someday, she’d teach that same love to her children and tell them how much she adored the Grandpa they would never meet. Ginny left the train yard and went back to work in the oncology ward. She hated the cancer that had taken her Daddy.

Written as part of the Friday Fictioneers challenge hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. The idea is to write a piece of flash fiction with a max limit of 100 words based on the photo prompt (above).

To read more stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Today’s story is exactly 100 words long.

Uncle Eli’s Machine

the machine

© Sandra Crook / Found at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blogspot

For two weeks, Evan had been investigating the odd, sprocketed contraption in the basement of the house he’d inherited from old Uncle Eli, an eccentric inventor who’d been tinkering with it for the past sixty years.

Evan didn’t fathom the machine’s purpose, but he did think he could get the gears moving.

He made one last adjustment with his screwdriver.

Evan jumped back as the large driver cog suddenly lurched one “ka-chunk” counterclockwise.

Then the light changed. “So, my time machine finally worked, I see.”

Evan turned. The figure speaking to him was Uncle Eli at age 26.

I wrote this as part of (last week’s) Friday Fictioneers challenge hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. The idea is to write a piece of flash fiction using a max of 100 words and base it on the photo prompt you see at the top of the page. The details are at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog (scroll down).

Read all of the responses to this flash fiction challenge at InLinkz.com (over 80 as of this writing).

My story is exactly 99 words long.

Daylight

tour boat

© The Storyteller’s Abode / Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers

It had been sixty-two years since Sean Becker had last seen the light of day. He had been thirty-five years old when he was murdered in the early morning hours of July 23rd in his native Los Angeles. Cause of death was a mysterious loss of blood.

For six decades, Sean walked the night and shunned the day; a creature whose name was only whispered in dark secrecy: “vampire”.

He first encountered Dr. Elizabeth Woods as she was leaving work at London’s Biomedical Research Centre. He stopped attacking her when she cried out that she could help him. Woods was developing treatments for rare blood disorders. Fourteen months later, she’d cured his.

Woods wanted to run more tests, but Sean was more interested in taking in the daytime sights. Tears streamed down his face as he boarded the tour boat.

I wrote this as part of a flash fiction writing challenge. The challenge is to write a flash fiction story with a word count of 100-150 based on the weekly photo prompt you can see at the top of the page. Find the challenge at Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers.

To read the other stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Once again, I “blame” Iain Kelly, since reading his work, including his response to this challenge, has inspired me to write more flash fiction. I brought this one in (not including this after-statement) at 148 words.

Praying on the Shore of Eternity

jerusalem

Image: Xinhua/Yin bogu

“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.” –Yehuda Amichai

Ever since the Israel-Palestinian Accords of 2022, it was illegal for a Jew to even visit the Kotel, let alone ascend to the top of the Temple Mount. The Muslim Holy places, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Dome of the Chain, would be soiled if a Jew even breathed the same air, or so it was said by the Islamic Mullahs. But Ezra Koen had grown up with as many Arab friends as Jews, so he knew which of the guards could be trusted to turn a blind eye…for a price (though the price these days was greatly prohibitive).

It had been fourteen years since a Jew had prayed on the Temple Mount, and the last man to do so, Rabbi Ari Boker, was arrested by the Palestinian State Police, and was rumored to have died in prison after a long period of torture.

Ezra was a nineteen year old Yeshiva student and already was thought to have a very promising Rabbinic career ahead of him, but lately, his most defining characteristic, at least in his own mind, was that he was a dreamer.

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First Contact Imperfect

ted

From the film “Ted 2” (2015)

The Qredderq came very close to their goal of communicating with humanity. However, being just a little off was going to have difficult if not disastrous results.

The Qredderq weren’t aliens in that they came from another planet. The Qreddreg were transdimensional life forms, and that sort of life was abundant. However, piercing transdimensional barriers in order to communicate was highly technical, energy intensive, and not always reliable, as the Qredderq were about to find out.

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The Monument

burhanpur

Burhanpur – Image: Adventures365.in

The Moti Mahal monument in Burhanpur, India, can be found on the bank of the Pondhari River to the southeast of the village.

Ross Hunter graduated from San Francisco State University four months ago and had been wandering the Asian subcontinent ever since. With a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and a $100,000 inheritance from a recently deceased grandfather, Ross felt this was the best way to spend his time.

He especially liked ruins and this one was particularly compelling. He was visiting the palace on a day when there were no other tourists. He’d come by rented motorcycle which was a lot faster than walking and a lot safer than hitchhiking.

He wasn’t seeking anything in particular, which is why it came as such a surprise when he found something, or rather, someone.

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Who Is A. Isaacs?

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

It was the third time this week that Jerry got an upgrade request for the server farm he managed from the mysterious “A. Isaacs.” Upgrade requests for the database from Operations and Development weren’t unusual, but ever since A. Isaacs joined the Ops/Dev team in Palo Alto, he or she had submitted the vast majority of them, and they were weird.

Jerry Mason was the Chief Maintenance Technician for CozmicCorp’s vast array of servers in the desert south of Phoenix. He was responsible for receiving requests and assigning them to the relevant personnel. He also reported on the ongoing status of the hardware and software, but the IT Team in California could monitor all of that automatically at this point.

What made Isaacs’ requests weird was that he or she seemed to have an unlimited budget. Isaacs had spent over a million dollars so far and Jerry got the feeling he or she (it was annoying not knowing which personal pronoun to use) was just getting warmed up.

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