Tag: Prose

Graveyard Shift

A ghost can’t be afraid of the dark. Can they?

Abby wouldn’t have thought so when she was alive. But now she knew. She was still as afraid of the dark as she’d always been. She hated waking up in the pitch dark mausoleum. Even though, now she could see in the dark. See her relatives stretching and waking. Hear old great great granny grumbling about her coffin being too small.

She’d been a precocious child and now she was a precocious ghost. Thoughtful and worried about doing things just right. But how are you supposed to haunt someone properly when you are afraid of your own boo’s?

Tonight the full moon shone bright in the crisp autumn sky. An abundance of stars twinkled. Making it seem like the ghosts were wearing sparkling costumes.

Old great great granny patted her on the head.

“Come now. Time for your lessons. You’ll have to learn the lore of the thirteen days leading up to All Hallows Eve.”

© RedCat

Written for the first day of Sammi Cox’s 13 Days of Samhain (volume ii) – A Horror / Halloween Writing Prompt Challenge. 

Image credits:

First image: Photo by Attila Lisinszky on Unsplash

Second image: Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

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Tower of Follies – Flash Fiction

“So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”, proclaimed the Queens herald.

But they all knew the truth. They would come to harm whether they did their duty or not. The only difference lay in how quickly the harm would come. The Queen cared not for their life. She didn’t give a thought to her subjects coming to harm. 

The only things she cared about was her wealth prospering, her power growing, her legacy and legend spreading, her monuments to rise and compete with the ancient marvels of the world. Hers would be the biggest temple, the highest tower, the grandest tomb.

Little did she suspect, hers would be the most spectacular assassination. Thought out and plotted by the greatest minds of the country. Impaled by the sacrificial bull. Crushed by falling marble. Interred in the fallen tower of follies. 

© RedCat

Written for tonight’s Prosery: Doing our duty at dVerse. The prompt where we write prose inspired by a given line from a poem and not exceeding the word count of 144.

Tonight’s line is from William Blake’s poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper:’ In Songs of Innocence (1789)

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm

Image credits:

First image: Palais idéal, Hauterives, France from Wikimedia Commons.
Second image: Photo by Hisham Zayadnh on Unsplash

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Monday Musings, September 6th – A Haibun

It’s been two weeks since I wrote a poem for the blog. Instead I’ve been busy writing mostly prose for my creative writing courses and reading and responding to other participants’ texts. I’ve also spent a weekend on the first mandatory group get together. Before getting on the train I had grand plans of what I was going to write for the blog in the evenings. That turned out to be utterly naive of me. When evenings came I was so tired I took long walks and then fell into bed without even having dinner.

Before this I had managed to build a routine writing poetry mostly in the weekday evenings and during the weekends. Now I have to build a new one reading and writing during the day, every day. Which has totally disrupted the old one. Right now I oscillate between being content I’ve kept every assignment deadline so far and feeling like a failure because I haven’t updated the blog. It will take some time to find a new equilibrium.

Honing my pen craft

Shedding papers like fall leaves

Waiting for calm winds

©RedCat

Read other Haibun’s written for the monthly dVerse prompt by me here.

Read other Daily Haibun’s here.

Image credits:

First image: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Second image: Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash
Third photo: Photo by Cedric Verstraete on Unsplash

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The Little Robot – Flash Fiction

PHOTO PROMPT© Ted Strutz

It was a kind little robot. Designed to keep lonely people company. One of them tinkered with its head and gave it wanderlust. Just to see how far a little robot without locomotion could go. 

Quite far as it turns out. Being small and cute. Kind and polite. It got humans to take it all over the world. Eventually one of the things it hadn’t done was take a road trip through America. So off it went. 

It got as far as Philly before an uncaring human stripped it for it’s parts and left the rest lying on the roadside. 

© RedCat

Photo by Brendan Steeves on Unsplash

For some reason all I could see was the remains of a robot head. And I immediately started thinking about “Iron Woman” or perhaps better known as hitchBOT. The little robot that hitchhiked all over, but met its end when it tried to hitchhike through the US.

Written for this week’s Friday Fictioneers. Click on the frog above to read more stories or post one of your own.

Hitchbot Goes to the Fair
Michael Barker, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Utter Tohubohu – Flash Fiction, MLMM Wordle 252

Like water caresses the streambed rocks, the mention of his crimes in the newspapers caressed his black heart. Carefully he clipped them all out to save in his well filled scrapbook. He got a kick out of knowing his artful displays had left the police in utter tohubohu. He’d left them no clues to follow.

He took pride in his time consuming careful preparations. Ruminating over every angle. Never acting impetus due to desire or need. Just as his master had taught him.

So he was extremely surprised when the continued news reporting and the media nicknaming him the Hieronymus Bosch killer, made him itch to complete a new art piece soon.

© RedCat

I might have read too many crime novels lately.

Click here to read other stories by me.

Written for Wordle #252 at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie. 

Water
Mention
Newspaper
Clip
Impetuous
Tohubohu– a state of chaos, confusion
Extreme
Ruminate
Caress
Angle
Kick
Surprise

Images:

First – The Last Judgment 

Second – Fall of the Damned

Both by Hieronymus Bosch via WikiMedia Commons

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Chestnut Trees – Flash Fiction

PHOTO PROMPT © Brenda Cox

” – It’s nothing to worry about, just a little wind. “

Little did he know it was a storm sent by vindictive spirits. Upset by the way he’d ignored the law of the land.

He’d come back from studying abroad, saying we needed to do things like modern folks did. Taming nature to our ends, not relying on her blessings. So he dammed the rivers and chopped down the woods to make workhouses spewing smoke day and night. When the wise ones cautioned him, he called them silly old soothsayers.

In the morning. Not one of his prized chestnut trees still stood.

© RedCat

Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

Written for this week’s Friday Fictioneers.

Click here to participate or read more stories.

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Morpheus Speaks – Flash Fiction

Photo by Robin Schreiner on Unsplash

Welcome to the labyrinth of dreams. Here the hallways twist and turn, intersections changing place at the speed of thoughts. Doors switch location in the blink of an eye.

You’ll travel here every night of your life. So there’s plenty of time to get to know the place.

Beware of old nightmares skulking in the shadows. They’ll stalk hesitant dreamers, hunt them with figments of their darkest fantasies. Watch out for time vortexes that’ll trap you in flashback loops as the real world moves on.

The intrepid explorer will in time form a thought-feel map of the place. Able to move between emotional spaces. Learn what a dream teaches, then move on to the next. The unaware wanderer is prey to the tug of war between nightmares and sweet dreams.

Remember! Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

© RedCat

Tonight it’s time for a monthly favorite at dVerse – Prosery. Where we write prose, not poetry, incorporating a given line from another work and not exceeding 144 words. 

Tonight’s line is “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.” from Joy Harjo’s “A Map to the Next World.” I strongly recommend reading the poem, it blew me away!

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash
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