© Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
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A ball game’s a ball game even at “The K” in Kansas City.
Jeff scored a hot dog and watered-down beer and relaxed back into his seat. The Royals were playing against the Texas Rangers but that didn’t matter much to him. It was kind of strange to be watching baseball in February, but it was in the low 50s, so he thought a light jacket would do.
PHOTO PROMPT © Alicia Jamtaas
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Downtown passersby were aghast as they watched a man wave goodbye to the woman with one leg dangling out of the second-floor window.
“Do something! She’ll fall.”
Instead of responding to an emergency, the man in the baseball cap smiled. “No, she can’t fall. You see she’s…”
Sirens approaching from the east told the gathering crowd that someone had called 911.
J Hardy Carroll
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She dreamed of this all her life and now, she’d found it. A burned out brick building next to a concrete bridge. Emily had searched photographic archives from all over the world before discovering the object of her nightmares in rural Ohio. She had to push the overgrown foliage aside just to get a look at it. She didn’t know how she remembered, but she put her foot on the edge of one of the lower windows. Then she heard a newborn baby cry. Her mother had abandoned her there. Her “Daddy” was the firefighter who found and adopted her.
PHOTO PROMPT © Na’ama Yehuda
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Okay, fine. I’m a “Ken” in a Barbie world. How did that happen? Darn Rochelle and her writing prompts, anyway.
“It’s not Rochelle, Grandpa. It’s me.”
“Dani, have you flipped? You can’t leave me like this.”
“I turn Grandpa into a Ken doll.”
© Fleur Lind
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Taylor knew she was in a different universe when she was driving on the wrong side of the road.
“It finally worked.” She was grinning and her heart was hopeful. Maybe she’d finally found the way back home.
But crossing the infinity line was only the beginning. She had to find and take the right exit, which meant using the wrong ones to change all history. Getting the Greek civilization off the ground in 1600 BCE, watching the birth of Buddha in 486 BCE, publishing Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1905.
PHOTO PROMPT – © Jennifer Pendergast
Fourteen-year-old Jerry Craft had shoved his mask deep into the back pocket of his dusty stained jeans five-hundred miles ago. He’d scurried into a boxcar at Denver and the inspectors hadn’t found him when they stopped in Salt Lake. Now somewhere in Nevada, August heat scorching him clean, he felt free. “No COVID’s gonna get me.” He suddenly coughed, doubling over and nearly falling from his perch just above the car coupling. Sitting down, his inner demon quieted and let him speak once more. “With Ma and Pa already dead, ain’t gonna let COVID get me before the cancer does.”
Promotional image for the published anthology of drabbles “Dark X-Mas.”
I just found out that the ebook for Eleanor Merry Presents: Dark X-Mas Holiday Drabbles will be offered absolutely free on December 25th and 26th. I’ve contributed two “dark” Christmas tales among the vast multitude of 100-word tales of Yuletide horror.
Promotional image for the soon-to-be published anthology of drabbles “Dark X-Mas.”
Not one but two of my drabbles have been accepted in the Eleanor Merry Presents Christmas Horror anthology “Dark X-Mas”.
According to the blurb for Dark X-Mas Drabbles Anthology:
I’m dreaming of a Dark Christmas
With every little tale that I read
When the knife blades glisten
And scared children listen
To hear slayers in the night
Where sugarplums can be gory
In the frightening elf story
And trees eat favorite household pets
There are gifts on all the pages
Of terror through the ages
Told of gift giving regrets
I’m dreaming of a Dark Christmas
With every little tale I read
While the bright lights shine
And the family dines In the soft fireplace glow
So hold loved ones tight
It’s not Santa visiting tonight
Death lies buried in the snow.
I actually don’t know a whole lot about co-publishers Eleanor Merry and Cassandra Angler, but some other authors I’ve been published with before, including David Bowmore and Shawn Klimek, are participating, so I figured “what the heck?”
Promotional image from Dark Hare Press
Okay, I just received word from the editor that I can now talk about my most recently accepted for publication story. It’s a Drabble, which is a short story of exactly 100 words (no more and no less, and believe me, it’s a tough target to hit).
My wee tale is called “Death Visits Mexico” for Black Hare Press for their Dark Drabbles #5 anthology called “Unravel.” I wrote a somewhat different version of this a few years back, but even though it was short, I still had to re-edit it to make the word count work.
The theme of “Unravel” is dark crime stories, or what I think of as crime noir. Although they would accept up to five drabbles from the same author, I only submitted one due to my recent time constraints. You can expect to see both digital and print versions of the book available this year on September 2019.
You can also find out about Black Hare Press on Facebook.
Time to update my Publications again.
© Russell Gayer
“What the hell?” Sixty-two year old millionaire Warren Hollister stared down the long gully carved in his quarry terminating at an unconscious man being put on a wheeled gurney by ambulance attendants.
“It’s like I was saying. Thought he was dead, but when I checked, he was breathing,” gasped Jake Fischer, the Foreman.
“Not a scratch on him.” Hollister shook his head in wonder.
“No clothes either.”
“What are you suggesting?.”
“Who knows what happened? Last year the Russkies sent up Sputnik, and today, a man falls from the sky.”
“A superman, Jake, and right now, he’s mine.”
I authored this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields flash fiction writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 98.
This is actually part of a story that’s been floating around my head for years, the idea that a mysterious man can fall from the sky and into the hands of what could be a ruthless millionaire. Since Jake mentions that Sputnik was put in orbit the previous year, that puts my story in 1958, just over 60 years ago.
I got the scene for my rock quarry from this news story and very loosely based it on the 1953 “Adventures of Superman” television show episode Panic in the Sky (video).
To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
