PHOTO PROMPT © LIsa Fox There it sat, unused, isolated; the manifestation of the best efforts of across-the-aisle compromise in both houses. Governor Wilmer had sighed as she scribbled her signature on the bill, a subtle acknowledgment of her complicity, an impotent figurehead of the shambles of a once actualized ideal: representative government. She left…
Category: fiction
#FF — Belos Smiled
PHOTO PROMPT © Douglas M. MacIlroy Belos smiled. It had started with tinker-toys. His workshop held a machine that would take humankind to Mars. For a small man, his conception manifested into large moving parts and metal-tubed hexagons, then plugged its drive into the bright rectangle modeled on black hole energy. Belos whistled as he…
#FF — Once Mrs. Cleaver
PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Mom was a Mrs. Cleaver parent until I was five, making time to show me I was loved. But mom’s priorities changed to going out and sleeping in late. By my teens, we were mutually antagonistic strangers. When she drank and I mouthed off, she ripped my hair out, slapped…
#FF — Voila!
PHOTO PROMPT © Brenda Cox A Frenchman, Scooby-Doo, and a Clown walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “What’ll you have?” The Frenchman says, “I will have some simple joy, escape from the ever-worsening gloom that has infected the city.” Scooby-Doo says, [translated] “I’ll have some Scooby Snacks, but what I really want is a…
#FF — Through the Portal
PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot Silver-for-Gold helped me with my dating profile as all of my pictures were of Herbert and I. They edited him out. The metaphor hurt. I got a “wink” from Haruki, who listed his hobbies as reading and writing. We became correspondents over the next year. Post-pandemic, I was on a…
#FF — Wolf God
PHOTO PROMPT © Dale Rogerson Stardate: September 29, 2049Galaxy: Red Dwarf, Wolf A sanitation truck is crawling along Mills Street. Its beep…beep…beep is irritating yet strangely soothing. The sound crawls into my subconscious and wakes me from cyber-sleep. I hold still while tubes recede from my ports; the pod door whooshes open. I find Daisy,…
#FF — The Ultimate AI
PHOTO PROMPT© Liz Young Model XLR7000 promised to be the ultimate AI. Marty, mesmerized by youtube promotional videos, secured a second mortgage on her house. She drank a shot of tequila the day the email arrived confirming she would be one of the first thousand customers to receive a unit in January. Affectionately known as…
Tao-Talk 