Author: michaelwynnauthor

A Leg up the Ladder

/ michaelwynnauthor / 79 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll

A little bit of whimsy this week.

“You’re not trying hard for promotion are you PC Dilley?”
“Well I…”
“What’s the major piece of evidence in this case?”
“A prosthetic leg was left behind, sir.”
“And what do all the suspects you’ve trooped in have in common?”
“Two legs, sir.”
“Exactly, they’ve all got two legs. We hardly need strip searches to determine that.”
“No sir. I just thought maybe the leg was a red herring.”
“You mean planted to confuse us?”
“Yes sir.”
“And consequently this lot are here because…?”
“They all work in the prosthetic limbs factory, sir.”
“My God, Dilley, you’ll make Sergeant yet.”

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

 

The Lost Light

/ michaelwynnauthor / 68 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

The room’s acoustics resonated perfectly; the sparkling new instruments readied for action arranged with OCD precision. Gone were the days of starving for his music and making do. His fingers danced along the frets of a guitar, spewing out a few of his time worn riffs.
‘I’ll lay down the guitar part first; it’ll be like the old days.’
He hummed and strummed his signature tune. Worrying the tuning keys and hazily turning knobs, he smeared a tear across his cheek.
He was waiting for something to come but his mind was a museum, important exhibits but nothing new within.

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Hidden

/ michaelwynnauthor / 44 Comments

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Fatima Fakier Deria

Our old barge nudged the quay.
“Tie us up!” Papa shouted.
I held the rope as though it were something peculiar. ‘Do everything normally,’ Papa had said. Suddenly, I didn’t know what that was but then we’d never hidden an allied airman before.
My eyes tracked across the soldiers and the policeman waiting to inspect the boat.
“You hot?” barked the officer.
“Been cooking breakfast,” Papa interjected, drawing calmly on his pipe.
The officer’s eyes flicked from me to the cabin door; trickling sweat stung my eyes.
“Going north?” he asked, adding impassively, “Might be best to unload before Amsterdam.”

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Born Free but Chained to Obligation

/ michaelwynnauthor / 85 Comments

I have been a little self indulgent this week. This is an adapted extract from my recently completed novel about a tramp, nicknamed Wordsworth for his quirky,  homespun philosophy and his penchant for reciting poetry in the street. He  guards his freedom jealously but ends up joining forces with a road sweeper to solve a crime of abuse and exploitation.

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT submitted by Courtney Wright. © Photographer prefers to remain anonymous.

It’s hard to determine where the dirty clothes finish and Wordsworth himself begins. Filthy dreadlocks hang from beneath his beanie and his face resembles an unkempt garden, hair sprouting wherever a follicle can get a foothold. His worn boots are held together by string and tape.
I’d seen him about town but was as guilty as the next person of paying him no heed. I offered a pair of my old boots.
“I take those and you’ll start asking things of me. Wordsworth is beholden to no man.”
“But they’re just a pair…”
“No,” he interrupted me, “They’re a contract.”

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Now or Never

/ michaelwynnauthor / 41 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT ©Jill Wisoff

Laura stared at the city lights imagining the party people guzzling champagne and caviar. She was of this city too; they were the lights of her youth’s dreams, so why was she serving stolid stew of the cheapest cuts every night?
“Buck,” she called to a man with a helping of her stew hanging from his moustache, “Is this it then?”
Buck was nonplussed, “Good food, good company. What more is there?”
‘Hell!’ she thought. She flipped the closed sign round on the door. “Lock up when you’re finished.”
“Where you going?”
“To find company who know how to eat.”

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Self Portrait

/ michaelwynnauthor / 56 Comments

This week, an idea that has been bobbing about in my mind for a while now without form or structure. I’ve tried to realise it here but I’m not sure about the result; it will be interesting to hear your opinions.

PHOTO PROMPT © Jan Wayne Fields

 

 

 

 

 

Salvin writhed in his slumber, trapped in a painting. He knew it from the thick black outline round his shape; the mirror, creased in the middle and suspended from a  staircase sweeping to infinity on the neck of a frightened horse.
The sun burnt fiercely with the promise inherent in bright colours waning to the calm of cobalt. Yet where he stood was arid.
Time dripped blood-like from a broken watch caught in the gnarled fingers of a dead tree. He recognised the tree in the mirror.
Snatching up brushes and violent hues, he lunged at the canvas and began, “Self-Portrait.”

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

(A short explanation: Van Gogh would often include a dead or dying flower or branch  to represent himself in his paintings and obviously symbolism pervades most art. Here we’re supposed to be in an artist’s dream.)

The Primary School Teacher

/ michaelwynnauthor / 62 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

PROMPT © Douglas M. MacIlroy

They’d been her charges since they were five; now they were dispersing to higher schools. She liked to think with a good start. She was sending them out to bloom into the butterflies she hoped they’d become.
But today was sadder than the emptied playground.
This year one butterfly wouldn’t emerge. Melissa wouldn’t be graduating.
As her pupils waved goodbye, she imagined she saw the pretty smile and ponytails.
‘Why did it have to be her?’ But she knew she’d be asking the same for any of them. ‘Why did it have to be?’ Sometimes life just doesn’t proffer answers.

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Maybe Tomorrow

/ michaelwynnauthor / 60 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Yarnspinnerr

The solid slab of heat pinned Forbes down into his chair. The wicker scored a painful lattice in his dripping thighs but not painful enough to consider moving.
For want of anything else to look at, his hooded eyes rested on the ceiling fan and the flies buzzing endless figures-of-eight beneath it. Their energy drained him more.
“Any chance of having the fan on?”
“Fan broken many years.”
“I’ll fix it for a beer. What’s wrong with it?”
“No ‘lectric, need re-wiring.”
Forbes sighed, as he had the day before and the one before that, “Put the beer on the tab.”
Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

Hope is Forever, an Allegory

/ michaelwynnauthor / 41 Comments

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

Proudly stood that solitary tree amid the ochre bricks and daisy-strewn lawns. It grew where the grass wasn’t mown; a magnet for kids from streets around, its arms constantly full of adventures enacted by marauders, happily distracted from the tedium of long holidays.
So we couldn’t comprehend the sudden death, lightning dealt our friend. The leaves crumbled and the lifeless branches humbled; it remained bare for five years and bound with barbed wire to keep the children down, who just climbed higher.
Until one spring, a sprout of green and branches swarmed again with naive belief and that prodigious disregard for mortality.

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.

The Last Day Mending Nets

/ michaelwynnauthor / 31 Comments

 

 

 

 

PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

Saline tanned and rope-roughed hands, the old fisherman pulls the needle through and round, over and hitch as he’s always done.
The waves against the sea wall fizzle respect for a worthy adversary; the gulls keen camaraderie from a deferential blue sky.
A disabled, rotting hull, he mends nets but can no longer fish. His stagnant, rock-pooled tears harbour painful pining beneath dead eyes, lamenting brutal years of toil.
Life’s soundtrack of the sea’s noises, fades like a relentlessly turning record slowing to an elegy. There’s a last weary wisp of breath and the needle drops unnoticed to the cobbles.

Written for Friday Fictioneers – a 100 words story based on a photo prompt. Hosted by Rochelle. Read the other entries here.