Drachenfutter

100 words for Friday Fictioneers that may save your life.

(Last week I didn’t get to half of the stories because I couldn’t. Still working on answering comments. Insert excuses here. I remember when we thought 20 stories was a good number. Wish me luck this week. I’ll try. Aloha, D.)

 

(Copyright Roger Bultot)

 

I sift ashes between my fingers as the ambulance bearing two bodies departs.

“A waste,” I utter.

“Arson?”

Newly married, my apprentice investigator had a roving eye and much to learn.

“Something else, son” I reply. “Review what we know.”

“Witnesses say the husband arrived home pre-dawn carrying a small gift-wrapped package. He entered the house and the wife was heard shouting. There’s a brief silence, then sudden ignition.”

“Characteristics?”

“Volatility, accelerated involvement, high heat.”

“Conclusion?”

“It can’t be…”

“Insufficent drachenfutter. Remember it. The life you save may be your own.”

 

 

 

These Shoes

100 words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below from David Stewart. (I once spent a long day sleeping and sick underneath just such a gazebo, listening to people walk above me unaware as I waited for a friend. I cannot imagine a lifetime of that.)

(Copyright David Stewart)

 

Officer Sloan cruises by the gazebo.

“You alright, Sam?”

I nod and smile.

Long ago a robbery suspect shot him. I called for help with his radio and kept pressure on the wound until I was tasered and arrested. Dash camera footage changed their minds and since then the police department has looked out for me. Like elephants, they have not forgotten.

Am I homeless? Guilty as charged. Hopeless? You tell me.

You’ll never know anyone’s story until you ask. Never know where you’ll find yourself until you’re there. Never know how it happened until it does.

Be nice.

 

 

 

Snow Angel

One hundreds words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below by Sandra Crook.

 

(Copyright Sandra Crook)

On the morning of my sixth birthday they were fighting again.

I took my Flexi-flyer to the estuary and hurled myself down chaotic tilted slabs of tidal floes and out onto the thinner ice of the river, which popped and cracked behind me as I passed.

At day’s end, cold, wet and tired, I felt something soft brush my eyelid. I lay down on the sled and looked up. Flakes the size of quarters spiraled from a featureless gray sky.

As the new snow fell silently with the night I closed my eyes and wondered whether they would miss me.

 

 

Following Seas

I’ve been helping a friend drain a swamp and feel the need to apologize for being behind the curve last week in reading and commenting. Going to fix that now as the swamp is drained and the alligators are all suitcases now.

Mahalo and Aloha, D.

 

100 words for Friday Fictioneers inspired by the photo below from Georgia Koch.

 

(Copyright Georgia Koch)

 

“I could call the Coast Guard.”

“And tell them what? An old man is going rowing?”

He wondered whether he’d made a mistake in sharing his plans. After half a lifetime spent at sea, this last voyage seemed only natural.

“I won’t have you watch me die a slow death in one of those homes, son.”

“It wouldn’t be like that…”

“It’s always like that. They just don’t put it in the brochure because it’s bad for business.”

Ebb tide. The sea beckoned. Time to go.

“I love you, son.”

“Fair winds, Dad.”

Shank’s Mare to Summer

100 words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below (courtesy of a brilliant stained glass artist named Jean L. Hays). Every road, just like most stories, has a beginning, a middle and an end. Most of us know where ours began, many have seen the middle and a very few know where theirs will end. No matter where yours takes you, remember to enjoy the journey. Aloha, D.

 

(Copyright Jean L. Hays)

Headed southwest through bitter cold and spindrift snow towards a distant home, he found a battered sheet of drywall near an overpass and dragged it up to where the span met sloped berm, hoping to use it as a windbreak or makeshift mattress.

On the concrete abutment above the ashes of an old campfire someone had written in charcoal, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

He stared at the words for a long time, thinking of her, then shivered and returned to the highway to search the windblown verge for something to wrap himself in besides Tolkien and memories.

 

 

Long Time Coming

99 words for Friday Fictioneers, a caravan of sorts. People come and go at will, but their stories remain. The good ones are like rain in the desert.

 

 

After walking for an eternity over endless dunes, he came upon salvation in a verdant glade nestled between green valley walls shaded by long white clouds. Kneeling in reverence and gratitude, he placed his hands on either side of a slick fosse and inhaled the fragrance of moss-furred walls.

When his lips met wetness, warm and tremulous, he waited, savoring the moment. It was a sweet thing to be so close, to feel the wellspring of life tremble beneath him, and to know that he could drink deep until sated.

That night he slept and dreamt of geysers erupting.

 

A Four Monkey Day

Bonnie Carini never reads my blog.

She goes a mile a minute and has a lot on her plate so of course, I forgive her. We met in the late eighties when she was a diver for Atlantis Submarines and I was a green Co-Pilot. She moved on and we kept in touch through the intervening years. In June of 2003 I met her by chance at the Keahole Kona airport departure lounge. I was seeing off a friend and she was headed to New York for a week before going to the Faroe Islands with a small crew to film a documentary about life there. As they called her flight, she said I should come along as a camera operator, gaffer, interviewer and jack of all trades. They called her flight again, we hugged, I said I’d think about it….and off she went.

A week later I called her room at the Palace Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, from my room at the same hotel and told her I’d see her at the airport the next morning for our connecting flight to Vagar Airport in the Faroes. She was only slightly surprised.

We spent three weeks that summer shooting footage and meeting people and finding our way around some of the most beautiful group of islands on the face of the planet. At breakfast one morning, sitting on the lanai of our rental house in Leynar and close to the end of our trip, we decided that we needed to tell a larger story about the islands and the people that grace them.

Next summer we returned for six weeks and began writing Pilot Whale Fog, a story of a musically gifted boy befriended by a pilot whale in a country where the whales are most often referred to as ‘dinner’. We returned to Hawaii and tried to market our nascent screenplay but truth be told, it needed a lot more work. The seed was there, but it needed water and care. In 2010 through 2012 we spent many days meeting in Kona at the Royal Kona Resort to rewrite, reshape and reboot the screenplay. During those long days, if we found lightning in a bottle and the work went well, we would ask the waitress at the oceanside bar for one of their little plastic monkeys they used to decorate Mai Tai’s. I’ve got a drawer full of them now and the result is a finished product that is a hundred times better than the original. Since then Bonnie has done what she does best and pushed the work, getting it out into the wider world and in front of as many people in the business as is humanly possible.

This October we received word that the screenplay for Pilot Whale Fog had been made an Official Selection at the 2014 International Family Film Festival to be held in early November in Los Angeles. This is thanks to a lot of perseverance on her part and I want to thank her for it on the pages of this blog. That way if she ever does read it, she’ll know that it means a lot to me to have been on the journey with her. I know it’s not the Oscars…yet, but it’s pretty cool. (You can’t get there if you don’t try and if you don’t ask, the answer’s always ‘no’.)

So, thank you, Bonnie. Today’s at least a four monkey day.

Aloha,

D.

 

Like Roses

 

I usually only post when the subject has merit of some sort. Today I’m posting because I want to share something and ask a question.

I’ve been sorting through five and a half boxes of old manuscripts of the first novel I co-wrote with John Pace, titled The Last Resort. I’m saving files of attendant research and snippets of early copies to establish provenance and throwing the rest away. In one box, along with several ‘good’ rejection letters from major publishers at the time, letters from our agent and bits of history germane only to us, I found four copies of a poem which I’ve included below.

Something about it resonated with me and I thought about using it as a flash fiction submission for Friday Fictioneers. Have any of you have ever read Like Roses. Can you tell me the name of the author?

Sincerely,

Doug

 

P.S. To those of you who have ‘followed’ me recently…and to the faithful old timers…thank you. I hope you agree with my preference for not constantly spamming this space with filler. I do appreciate your readership and try my very best not to abuse the privilege. Aloha, D.

 

Like Roses

The freshness

of her smile delighted;

Like roses.

And her life

was filled with beauty;

Like roses.

Peaceful

from the land she grew;

Like roses.

Abruptly

but inevitably she was snipped;

Like roses.

May the earth

fall gently on her coffin;

Like roses.

What do you think of this poem? (WordPress will not let me add spaces between stanzas…or this poor workman doesn’t yet know how to format in WordPress) Who wrote it? John Pace? Perhaps someone out there knows the author. I’d like to give them credit. Thanks for reading.

Critical Excursion

100 words For Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below. Those of you familiar with my weekly stories will know that I try to refrain from overlong introductions. Today is no different, but for those interested in the subject, I have added a short afterward. I highly recommend that you don’t read it (useless you’re curious and have the time). The story is accurate and stands alone.

 

Copyright Marie Gail Stratford

The soft glow flared to a brilliant, beautiful blue. Then darkness fell.

Above the turmoil of boiling water the phone at the end of the catwalk rings. My fingers never lose contact with the handrails as I find my way there.

“Rick, we’ve got a high radiation alarm in pond twenty-one,” my supervisor says. “What’s happening?”

“Criticality incident. Center section fuel rods.”

“You certain?”

“Cherenkov flare. Heat pulse. And I’m blind.”

“Can you self-evacuate?”

 

“Probably, but I can’t outrun what’s coming. Don’t send anyone. I’ll just rest here.”

 

“Rick…”

“Yeah?”

“Godspeed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuclear power is an esoteric field, full of jargon and unwieldy terms usually mangled by newscasters, but to those in the industry it is a pure science, stark yet somehow elegant. It is also a slippery beast that every now and then escapes from the mechanical prisons we try to confine it to. When this happens, it happens fast. Invisible high-energy sub-atomic particles rip through fragile DNA and other cellular structures and do irreparable damage in the blink of an eye. The human machine can keep running for a while, depending on the full body radiation dose it has received, but all the myriad chemical reactions required to sustain life are adversely affected and eventually the body grinds to a halt in an ugly and painful death. All nuclear industry workers know the risks and work hard to minimize them, but for the unlucky few down through history, being near a critical excursion is like winning the lottery in reverse.

And since you’re still here, I think it germane to note that our sun is a fusion reactor in the sky and that we are being irradiated every day by it. Radiation from the decay of Carbon-14 in the long bones of your legs is a significant part of your lifetime dose. If you linger in Grand Central Terminal for a day, radiation from the granite used in its construction will add to your lifetime dose. Fly much? Airline pilots have much higher lifetime doses of radiation than those of us who work on the ground. In my three years aboard the USS-Sargo, a fast attack submarine, I received exactly 1.625 rem of whole body radiation.

Radiation is electromagnetic energy. We are awash in it day and night, so much so that our eyes evolved to detect radiation in the visible spectrum. Nuclear power is a tool of man. If there is a danger associated with it, it stems wholly from our failure to maintain adequate safeguards. Educate yourself, know your physics and above all, don’t listen to the talking heads on the TV screen. Go figure it out for yourself.

 

Still here?

A Little Trim

100 words for Friday Fictioneers, a tiny band of writers on the winding road of life whose journey each week sometimes includes writing a short story based on a photo prompt (shown below courtesy of Bjorn Rudberg). The head of the road crew is Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

 

(Copyright Bjorn Rudberg.)

The woman who cuts my hair smells of lavender and sometimes the sea if she has gone swimming in the morning. Barefoot, in jeans, her fuchsia silk blouse unbuttoned just so, she leans close as she works and tells me how the water felt on her skin or of the color of the dawn.

I sit still and erect, every sense on edge until she finishes. She never asks if I am satisfied.

I pay, then press my tip into her warm hands.

“Come again.” She smiles.

The men in her waiting room frown at me as I leave.