MicroZine Image Prompt #7
The Challenge:
Write a story using the following rules:
Must be exactly 6-words, 50-words, or 100-words in length OR between 101 – 500 words. Title is never counted towards word count.
Any genre is allowed but if a Trigger Warning is needed, please indicate so behind the title. (Ex. TITLE [TW])
Share your story in the comments or Substack Notes. Remember to TAG for a chance to be featured in future posts.
Bonus Challenges:
For those of you who like to push yourselves beyond what you already know you are capable of…
Write a story using ALL of the story lengths: 6-words, 50-words, and 100-words.
Write a STACKed STORY. This is a story that starts as 6-words then is a continuation story at 50-words, and has one final continuation at 100-words.
Harley Siftin was as mean as a snake. He didn’t give a hot damn about anybody else. He did not view others even as a necessary evil, he simply took a hard pass.
Maybe no man is an island, but Harley certainly was an archipelago. With a very narrow isthmus.
(50 words)
Tickets – Île sans Retour – one way (6 words)
Acrid steam rose as hot lava crept over the serrated shoreline into turgid waters. An amber pathway appeared through dense foliage as a molten snake slithered seawards. The irascible prospector rubbed claw-like fingers through a dense thicket of fashionable whiskers as he thrust the parchment towards the Governor’s representative. “Sign or be damned”, he growled. “I lay claim to Devil’s Island”. The skiff rocked violently as breakers scraped it across razor sharp corals. Searing heat illuminated the man’s features, twisted with greed. Sailors crossed themselves as they watched flaming fingers beckon him shoreward, his mad eyes flecked with golden dreams.
(100 words)
He pressed the vintage radio tightly to one ear. Calm maritime apprehensions. Doom-laden portents of violence, a tsunami of warnings. He’d grown immune to scaremongering. Waking, he sensed an absence of familiarity as the deck rocked precariously above an island that hadn’t existed when the shipping forecast crackled into life.
(50 words)
Is-land, Iceland, frozen Greenland, equals Newfoundland.
My 6 word story:
“A little Earth, calming the Sea “
This was FUN
Here’s a spoof on Hemingway’s 6-word story: For sale. “Kama Sutra.” Hardly used.
MicroZine – Image Prompt #7
(Artistic rule adjustment to prime word count +1 = 7, 51 & 101)
TITLE – LITTLE BOY BLUE
“Why didn’t you follow the closing procedures?”
It was my first time Directing an Evening Viewing on my own and with sparse training I wasn’t sure what I missed. My corporal work of mercy was gently skippering loved ones through the storms of their most vulnerable moments but procedurally, I was a barrel rider bobbing deeply in whitewater.
“A Hispanic man came in after office hours to make a final pre-need payment. Maria took it but when she asked how he made it through the lobby doors, he said an Asian kid in blue opened them, playing with those paperairplangels you make…” my shocked face interrupted her. “I followed your list verbatim, locked the doors and my family was Hispanic with no children present.” Later, Maria would give me the names of the man’s surrounding plots and alone in a dark cemetery, I brought Dodgerblue carnations and tears to pour onto the neighborly spirit shores of the Aoshima Family.