“It’s just a tire shop, Dad! This can’t be where we’re meeting the rainbow-smuggler!” Inside, a cheerful woman in a colorful sari stood out of the rain, waiting. “I’d like a rainbow,” Retnam said from her wheelchair. “Where are they?” “They’re hiding in plain sight, my dear!” the rainbow-smuggler said, shrugging. “Just reach into a tire.” Retnam did, pulling out a huge rainbow-colored taffy. She laughed, then frowned. “But it’s not REAL!” she cried. “Look up, Retnam!” the woman said, pointing to the rain-cleared sky. “There will always be a rainbow over your head, even when you can’t see it.”
Lisa is today’s host at dVerse’s Prosery, and says: "Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to incorporate the quote ["I dress in their stories patterned and purple as nigh" –from “When We Sing of Might,” by Kimberly Blaeser] into a piece of prose. This can be either flash fiction, nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, but it must be prose! Not prose poetry, and not a poem. And it must be no longer than 144 words, not including the title. (It does not have to be exactly 144 words, but it can’t exceed 144 words.)
Deathbeds
Their graves are trash bins, medical refuse after each organ is harvested, the doctor careful to preserve the parts but not the whole. There is money to be had. She knew all this. She had worked as one. But the children she had aborted were not real to her.
Until the day she lay dying.
Suddenly they appeared before her eyes, smiling their forgiveness, and she relaxed. They understood! There was a God in heaven after all. Why, she didn’t even have to forgive herself!
She stretched out her hands to them but they stood out of reach midst the children she herself had decided to keep.
Her children saw her eyes widen.
“I dress in their stories patterned and purple as night,” she whispered.
What stories, Mom?
“The ones I took from them. The ones I robbed them of. Oh God! They burn!”
Update: So far this year almost 40 million children have been killed by choice. The leading cause of death is by abortion, far surpassing all other causes. According to data compiled by the Worldometer, a reference website that monitors statistics on health, the global population, the use of resources and deaths in real-time, over 40 million abortions are performed worldwide annually.
Mommy plays Lego with me I’m four and she’s thirty-three But I make up the games we play And she does exactly what I say.
We share the firetruck and the fireman He’s my Daddy and he’s her husband I get Santa for a party favor on my birthday She gets a candy for baking a cake so gay.
I get a funny-shaped red Lego piece And save two for Daddy when he says, “Please.” The red truck is outside my diagram It’s for the children killed in Afghanistan By an unmanned drone, they’re in no one’s Venn.
Don’t cry.
The Pentagon confirmed on November 3, 2021, that after the disastrously chaotic withdrawal of American troops which resulted in billions of dollars of military weaponry, hardware, and aircraft left behind as well as the suicide bombing of thirteen young American soldiers, three days later, it carried out a deadly drone strike that mistakenly killed ten innocent civilians on August 29: three Afghan adults and seven children.
The violent shuddering of masonry and the collapse of the great cathedral had left a thick cloud of dust like a shroud over the city. It settled like particles of mist coating every moving creature, turning everything a sinister gray. Here, the dead had numbered 750,000.
We eyed them from the Adviser, the multi-dimensional-intergalactic space lab, Commander Fauci. His otherwise pristine white lab coat was covered with beagle hair as he emerged from his I-CNN studio. He looked unconcerned. The interview had gone well.
Had we made the right choices? Only time would tell. Meanwhile, we needed to cover our tracks.
Honey Humberg had waited for this day all her life.
She’d worked and saved to build the “Humberg Bus” from scratch, designing, commissioning and assembling it, part by part. She painted it in homage to the DIY hippies that were her inspiration, free thinkers and dreamers all. She would tour Europe showcasing her singing talent and the world would fall at her feet.
In the square, the crowd cheered when the Humberg Bus arrived.
They left when she began singing.
“How much you want for the bus?” a man asked.
“One billion pounds,” she said bitterly, turning away.
Dear Rochelle and fellow Friday Fictioneers, This is my second stab at writing for this week’s prompt. I guess I must be out of practice: instead of fictioneering I ranted for a hundred words, posted then banished from inlinkz when I realized a piece of fiction it was not.Back to the photo promptand finding my muse again. :>)
Genre: Fiction; Word count: 100
Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers.
Rochelle asks that we use the photo prompt and limit our words to 100 or less.
Click on the frog to read more stories.
Andrea gripped her husband’s hand tightly as Grace ripped open the letter. It was from her birth mother. The fifteen-year-old had made them promise to give it to Grace when she too reached fifteen.
You were loved every moment I carried you. Just wanted you to know that. There won’t be a moment when I don’t love you.
Sighing, Grace looked up from the blunt, childish scrawl, a smile on her face.
“I believe her. She could have thrown me away like a piece of garbage. Speaking of which, Dad, can we get back to fixing up my motorcycle?”
I’ve heard it said that a woman should never be afraid of her own life. Yet I am. Every day the crowd multiplies. I grow old. The room grows smaller. Am I to be buried alive? Not with grave dirt, but with ghosts. The more confined I, the more rampant they. What diabolical art is this, that the dead suck life out of those they abhor? My nights are theirs to engorge upon in hopeless pain, my days spit out remnants of their celebration. For as vines strangle and overgrown briars encroach, my ghosts encircle me. And I am afraid.
Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers and Eugi’s Weekly Prompt. Eugi asks us to use any variation on the word prompt (“celebration”).
Rochelle Wisoff-Fields invites us weekly to join the Friday Fictioneers in their creative quests of a hundred words or less, prompted by a photo. Click on the frog to join in!
He was a wandering musician, traversing continents, twanging on his banjo, a wordless witness to a universal language.
No one knew his origins.
Still the story is told that he came from another world. And one came seeking him whose betrayal had left him mute. Powerless to make him return, she took with her the memory of his youthful fingers dancing on strings, his eyes expressive of no other purpose than seeking nameless tunes of faithless love.
Raindrops fall like tears on tree-trunk curtains, ethereal remnants of her departure from this world.
It was the first meeting of the Dadaist Society of New York’s Upper Downside. Mistrel McGarte chewed her lower lip mechanically. Rrrose IV had yet to show with the coveted clue to the Mona Lisa’s jilted lover’s true descendant: none other than Danette Brown, capitalist author of the DaDa Vinci Code. Mistrel sighed. There was a time for absurdity but not now. The capitalist clock was ticking alongside the urinal in the art gallery. A postman handed her an envelope. Mistrel tore it open. Fine particles of detritus, paint, bone floated free. A note inside read, “DNA here final clue.”
This Jolly Beggar 