For the photo that inspired this flash fiction story, please visit Flickr: L’Albufera: Momentos #16.
Nothing is quite as beautiful or breathtaking as a sunrise. Well, nothing quite as beautiful, anyway. Lots of things can take your breath away. Like an unexpected dip in the road, or a punch to the gut, or really bad news.
But mostly being plunged face first into cold water.
It was an hour before dawn. Father had set the fishing nets out overnight, and it was my job to rise before the sun and pull in the catch.
Half asleep, I yanked on the lines to cinch the nets. I stubbed my toe on a rock and muttered a curse.
Photo by Tina Hager, Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Via flickr.com/commons
“So, how small is the lens? Could it fit on the head of a pin?”
Roger looked excited, in a conspiratorial kind of way. He loved it when new tech was small enough to fit on the head of a pin.
“Smaller,” I told him. “The entire camera could fit comfortably on a fly.”
Roger let out a sound that – though he was far from being a 12-year-old girl – sounded something like, “Squee!” He clapped his hands together and turned the laptop to get a better look.
I let him enjoy the image of the sorority bathroom. It was harmless, mostly. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to catch us. Even if someone discovered the camera, no one could trace it back to us.
The entire camera had been built – atom by atom – as part of an exercise in nano-manufacturing. I had designed the lenses myself. It had taken a team of graduate students to do the rest. The best and brightest in Georgetown’s engineering program had spent several thousand hours creating the world’s smallest wireless video camera.
Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive
Here’s the best advice I can give you. Don’t die wearing a headdress.
Of all the things that suck about kicking it, and believe me there is an exhaustive list, the one that seriously chaps my incorporeal ass is that bullshit death mask rule.
I can understand looking like you did when your expiration date finally hit. I’m not one of those vain creeps who think every spirit walking around should look like George Clooney. (Although if there were sex in heaven, can you imagine the kind of play you’d get with a face like that? Sweet Valhalla!) However, I do think the powers that be get a little picky when it comes to dress code. I see no reason why I should spend the rest of eternity looking like Tonto.
"C is for Cats" by Lindsay Carmichael, as seen on Flickr.com
C was for Cat, as it always had been. The cats would not stop dancing. They pirouetted, paired off and salsa danced the night away. The rumba was a never-ending mosaic of fur and flash.
A has been for Apple ever since Adam and Eve feasted on the forbidden. B is for Boy. One American boy, abandoned by his Vietnamese captors. Maybe B was for Bamboo, the strange wood surrounding him. But C was for Cat, and still they danced.
When you leave a man in starving solitude, there is no telling the directions his mind will flow. In isolation, there isn’t an anchor. Instead, memory and fantasy ebb and flow, a Vonnegut Slaughterhouse mince of time. Bobby, now known as Sergeant Robert Parker, found himself in 1st grade. Ground zero. Day one.
So many paths lay open to a first grader. You can be anything. Astronaut, President of the United States, a British rock invader…well, maybe not British. Sgt. Parker lay on the hot, dry, dirt floor jealous of Bobby.
D was for Dog, and Bingo had been his name-o. Bingo, had only been a puppy then. They grew up together. D was also for Draft, which would turn Bobby into Private Robert Parker, and ultimately kill Bingo. Bobby got the letter in boot camp. An old dog by that time, Bingo sat at the corner of the driveway, next to the mailbox, waiting for Bobby to come home from the war, refusing to eat. That is where they found him, asleep forever. Without Bingo to chase them away, the cats would dance on. (more…)
We’re all pretty excited this week about the challenge we’ve given ourselves. We went to Flickr/Commons and were directed to choose a picture based on an algorithm including letters from our names. The picture thus chosen for us would be the inspiration for a piece of flash fiction of one thousand words or less. (Or maybe a little more if one needed more.)
Where we could, the picture was included in the post and should be properly attributed to the owner. We’re storytellers and we were trying to prove that a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words. In every case, we’ve been successful, though the degree of that success is up to you, our dear readers, to decide. If you’ve never commented on a post here, please consider doing so. We writers are fragile and your kind attention is very much appreciated.
The pictures, of course, are the property of the people at the other end of the link, not ours and we make no claim. The stories, though, are copyrighted 2012 by the individual authors. It’s up to each author what might be further done with them.
We hope you enjoy our experiment this week. Let us know what you think.
