Tag: prompted fiction

  • Going to the chapel…

    Another four prompts from Jolene.

    Another absurd little tale. Okay, maybe not that absurd.

    The prompts:

    1. laundromat 
    2. shocking announcement
    3. person who takes shortcuts 
    4. person who needs to remove a tattoo right away
    Gee, I really love you
    And we're gonna get married
    Going to the chapel of love

    The sunlight was more blinding than it had any right to be, piercing even eyes closed tight against such insults and it sent my head spinning. Or the room spinning. Or, the whole world had become a giant tilt-a-whirl and I fought the urge to vomit up all the liquor I had consumed at the—

    Umm. Record release party on the Strip. That sounded right, the answer hiding just behind the pounding on the inside of my skull by some wee gnome with a steel hammer.

    After which, I think it was followed by an an after-hours rave.

    I think. Things went all wobbly right after hailing the Uber with Jessie and that producer she had the hots for that we were chatting up at the release party.

    (more…)

  • Forfeit

    Here’s another short bit of fiction based on writing prompts from Jolene Rice. They are the following four items with the only rule being that you cannot kill off your main character

    1. attacked by squirrels
    2. what nobody wants to talk about
    3. mascot for a professional team
    4. animal psychic

    Apologies offered in advance.

    I do lost cats, mostly. Colic in horses if the vet’s backed up. Twice a year somebody’s parrot stops talking and I sit with it for an hour and tell the family what they already know, which is that the parrot wishes they would ask for more than “Polly wants a cracker.” One, in particular, had a secret habit of shouting “Fucking hell!” whenever the house was empty, it told me. Practiced it all day long, most days, by his reckoning.

    (more…)

  • Grave situation

    Flash fiction using Jolene’s prompt. Rules: Must use all four of the following and not kill your main character:

    1. This time it’s bound to work
    2. what is that smell?
    3. mortician
    4. toy maker

    “Gah! What’s that smell?”

    The shoveling did not stop. Nor did the speaker.

    “Gah! I say, Nate — What’s that smell?”

    “It’s called ‘death’, Jeff. I could go into the chemistry of putrescine, cadaverine and butyric acid but I’m afraid it would all go over your head and we’d still me forced to hear your heavy panting and repeated ‘Gah’ utterances because you have absolutely no respect for science.”

    “Why didn’t you just say ‘science’? That’s all I needed to know. Not those ‘ines and acids.”

    (more…)

  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • Epilogue

    an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

    Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven

    Sunny Day Parasol Co.

    Epilogue

    This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

    The Meridian Club had been a monument to high-stakes vice; now, it was just an open wound catching the city’s freezing rain. Red and blue police lights pulsed through the ruptured doorway, casting long, fractured shadows across the pulverized baccarat tables and the sea of abandoned chips.

    In the dead center of the devastation, Cross stood up from the gray ash and dusted off his suit.

    (more…)

  • Case File #15: Absolute Zero

    an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

    Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven

    Sunny Day Parasol Co.

    Case File #15: Absolute Zero

    This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

    Kogan’s lead ampoule shattered under my bandaged knuckles. The purified salt and cold iron filings scattered across the green felt, but the dead quicksilver didn’t just spill… It leapt. It shot from the broken glass like a liquid soul, violently drawn to the impossible shape of the Black Sulfur token.

    It hit the velvet exactly as Cross’s rotting entropy and Gallow’s crushing stasis slammed into the table.

    The ignition didn’t produce a fireball. It produced an execution.

    (more…)

  • Case File #14: Lead Comes to Dinner

    an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

    Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven

    Sunny Day Parasol Co.

    Case File #14: Lead Comes to Dinner

    This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

    Cross’s amused smile vanished, replaced by a look of ancient, profound annoyance.

    I sat dead still in the crushing quiet, my breath shallow and held tight. The dull, rhythmic ache from the deep cuts on my left hand from the shattered neon glass was a sharp, ordinary pain, the only thing anchoring me against the impossible physics tearing the air apart. My bandaged fingers held steady over the lead ampoule, caught in the dead center of a hurricane where absolute stasis was locked in a brutal collision with pure, corrosive entropy.

    (more…)

  • Case File #13: Quicksilver

    an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

    Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven

    Sunny Day Parasol Co.

    Case File #13: Quicksilver

    This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

    “I’ll pass on the gin,” I said, keeping my posture relaxed but ensuring my right hand rested casually near the slit in the midnight blue silk. “It dulls the reflexes, and I prefer to keep my head clear when I’m collecting a fee.”

    Cross’s smile didn’t waver. He leaned back, his tailored suit seeming to absorb the harsh glare of the chandelier above us.

    “Fair enough. Though I notice you are traveling remarkably light for a retrieval job, Miss Locke. Tell me you didn’t leave my property sitting in the back of that rented hack you took from the Brass Canary. It would be a terrible shame to lose our investment to a common cab driver.”

    “I wouldn’t insult either of us by being careless,” I said. My left hand, wrapped tight in fresh white gauze, went to the velvet clutch resting in my lap. My burnt fingers brushed the velvet, feeling the unnatural, freezing weight of Kogan’s ward humming against the escrow token.

    (more…)