Category: fiction

  • Heads will roll

    For Jolene Rice’s Storytime prompt.

    Must include the following:

    1. person who laughs at inappropriate times
    2. butcher
    3. wishes come true
    4. shhhh!

    When you are the Queen they let you laugh at inappropriate times.

    “Off with her head,” followed by a mad cackle. Or three. And then they say: “Oh, it’s just the Queen being a Queen,” and they join in once they realise there are consequences involved to not joining in the reverie.

    Then everyone is laughing.

    And it becomes less inappropriate to laugh because of reasons.

    The last one had the audacity to call Us a butcher. How very droll. And still, We made his head roll. Because when you are the Queen, they let you order someone’s head removed on whimsy. The laughter was nervous, but all courtiers laughed the same.

    When you are the Queen, people tend to laugh when you do. And rhyme when it suits a Queen to rhyme, too.

    One of Our subjects said, “I wish I wouldn’t hear my Queen laugh when she beheaded someone.”

    “Shhhh,” We said. “Your wishes have come true.”

    He smiled.

    “Off with his head,” We said.

    And We held Our laughter until his head dropped into the basket. Then We let peel a mad cackle or three.

  • The Killing Jar

    This tale is a standalone offering part of “Ash and Thorn”, a serialized web novel.

    For the best reading experience, read this story on ravensweald.art, home of sepulchral-gothic western serial, Vengeance, My Heart.

    Tales From the Fell Wynd #1

    The Rookery occupied the upper floor of what had been a tannery before the smell drove the trade elsewhere and the Dusk drove the owner after it. The vats were gone but the smell remained — something low and animal in the boards, the kind of thing you stopped noticing after a week while never fully forgetting.

    What it had going for it was that it was dry and safer than sleeping on the streets. Once you ignored the bill of ejectment posted far enough within the entryway to protect it from the elements, the place seemed cozy enough.

    Be it known to all persons that the premises of Fell and Hide are the lawful property of Aldric Fell, and that any person or persons found to be occupying, squatting upon, or otherwise making unlawful use of said premises without the express written consent of the aforementioned owner shall be subject to immediate and forcible removal therefrom, by whatever means are deemed necessary and proper, without recourse or remedy at law.

    All trespassers are hereby warned.

    The rest of the bill — signature of the authority, date and seal — had met with some misadventure along the years. Whoever it belonged to seemed unhurried about enforcing the decree.

    (more…)

  • Tweaks and Geeks

    Something I learned today. The old (ancient) method of letting people subscribe to your blog on WordPress Reader has been killed entirely by the Jetpack team. It was unsupported, but still worked as recently as a year ago. I tried to make it a simple process of subscribing to my RSS feed at ravensweald.art (which is attempting to remove the social elements from that blog), but that workaround no longer works around.

    So, I modified the site to include instructions on how you can add the story feeds to Reader manually. I wish they would not make it a multistep process, but alas, I’m not sure they really want you to follow a site operating outside of the WordPress.com/Jetpack ecosystem — which is a little silly when you think about it, if my suspicions are true.

    If you have been enjoying Vengeance, My Heart, please consider following the steps outlined on this page to add it to your feed.

    Failing that, consider bookmarking the site in your browser and swinging by a couple times a week: currently M/W/F — I may take a break this Friday to polish Episode 6.1 over the weekend. The episode is mostly ready, but I think I want to make another pass at edits before publishing.

    Hope y’all are doing swell. Let me know if you encounter any issues with my instructions.

  • Ice cream man

    It’s story time!

    Here’s another quick little bit of flash fiction in support of my friend, Jolene’s writing prompts. This one has the following four elements that should be included:

    1. driver of an ice cream truck
    2. competitive eater
    3. wrong side of the tracks
    4. stairs

    Enjoy.

    Dennis Marley sat on the stairs with their steep climb to the top of the hill, his destination within sight up where that hill crested. It was only a little more than a city’s block worth of climbing and he would finally arrive.

    There was only one problem. The truck.

    The damned truck.

    (more…)

  • Gerald’s Game

    With apologies to Stephen King for the title.

    Another fiction prompt from my good friend, Jolene.

    It’s story time!

    Here are your story line (+ can’t kill MC):

    1. Person who has broken something that cannot be replaced
    2. Person in professional disgrace
    3. Aquarium
    4. Forget to pass along the information

    Gerald Hailstone had the necessary paperwork. What he didn’t have, as it turned out, was authorization to share that paperwork.

    An oversight. Obviously.

    (more…)

  • Flash fiction from prompts — 31mar26

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    Another writing prompt from my good friend, Jolene. Must use all 4 elements, not allowed to kill your main character:

    1. lucky underwear
    2. clown school
    3. Person who asks what nobody ever asks
    4. person who did something bad a long, long, time ago

    I regretted telling my therapist about the lucky underwear. Sure, it brings me luck. You know what I mean. They’re good for increasing my chances at winning at meat raffles, make it easier to score some digits from the ladies at the bar, helps on loot raids with my guild… that kind of luck. They aren’t my shield, for chrissake. They just make me lucky.

    But she insisted I use them for therapy. Ugh.

    “Are you wearing your lucky underwear today, Steve?” she asked at the far end of the strip mall where she had asked me to meet her.

    (more…)

  • Jake’s Superette

    It’s story time!

    Another prompt from Jolene/Chico’s Mom. I’ve not participated in the last few because I was focused on Vivian Locke’s noir, but I thought I’d give this one a quick stab between my longer efforts.

    Not quite clocking at 1000 words, I followed the prompt on her site which included four elements (and a wild card)

    • Vet
    • Ex-superhero
    • Lottery tickets
    • A door that won’t open
    • Wild card! Tell your story as a romance

    The story was only lightly edited after it was written, so forgive me if there are any flaws.

    Comments are always appreciated.

    Jake’s Superette

    Sad beep. Sigh.

    Sad beep. Sigh.

    Sad beep. S—

    “Nuthin’?” asked the little shit at the register who couldn’t be more than fifteen, judging by the he sparse, fuzzy apology for a moustache boys his age favored.

    (more…)

  • Flash fiction prompt — 17feb26

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I am sharing those daily flash fiction prompts generated by AI that I personally feel are worth pursuing. Readers are welcome to try their hand at writing based on the prompts generated for this exercise, the goals of which are explained in this post.

    Today’s prompt:

    Genre: Noir

    Subgenre/Theme: Occult Detective / Rainy City Cynicism

    Prompt Elements:

    • The Neon Confessional: A low-rent detective agency located directly behind a massive, buzzing neon billboard that flickers in a sequence that inadvertently mimics Morse code.
    • The Lead-Lined Briefcase: An anonymous client leaves behind a case that is impossibly heavy for its size and remains freezing cold to the touch, even in the sweltering city heat.
    • The Silver-Nitrate Source: A cynical morgue photographer who develops crime scene photos using a strange chemical wash that occasionally reveals the last shadow that fell across a victim’s face.
    • The Charged Downpour: A localized, three-block radius where the rain carries a faint, static charge. It doesn’t electrocute, but it raises the hair on the back of the neck, makes the air taste sharply of ozone and copper, and leaves a mild, stinging prickle on any exposed skin.
    (more…)

  • Flash fiction prompt — 12feb26

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I am sharing flash fiction prompts generated by AI unless I don’t feel they are personally worth pursuing. Readers are welcome to try their hand at writing based on the prompts generated for this exercise, the goals of which are explained in this post.

    Today’s prompt:

    Subgenre: Appalachian Gothic / Cosmic Horror

    Key Elements:

    • A mine shaft that was sealed up fifty years ago but has started breathing.
    • A family bible with names burned out rather than crossed out.
    • The sound of a fiddle playing a song that has no end.
    • A jar of moonshine that doesn’t reflect the light.

    Optional Tone Constraint: The narrator must be unreliable.

    (more…)

  • On Forage

    This piece is based on the flash fiction prompt posted yesterday and follows my personal guidelines as described in this post.

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    Genre: Speculative fiction

    Subgenre: Biopunk / Post-Apocalyptic

    Seattle, South of Pioneer Square Station ruins; 73 years after The Fall

    Kit Keyes could just see the daylight at the end of the tunnel from where she stood on the rusted, flaking remains of light rail tracks. There was not much sun to set the the end of the tunnel alight, as the perpetual twilight of the monsoons filtered out most of it before it even had a chance to get to the ground. It was pervasive gloom that came with the winter months around November and sometimes lasted until as late as May. She half-disbelieved the elders when they said that it had not always been this way; she had known nothing but the winter monsoons for her twenty years of age.

    She watched for shadows in that twilight. Patrols regularly cleared out the tunnels of the dwindling population of raiders and ne’er-do-well types that tested the clan’s defenses on a perennial basis north of The Square, only to discover the defenses had only hardened since their last attempt. A few hundred meter south, on the other hand — that section had never been properly secured. Something about that open mouth bothered her this morning. She could not put her finger on what, something that bothered her more than the empty space itself.

    It just so happened that south of the Square was some of the best fungus forage on the Line.

    (more…)