Friday Fiction – Preserving Beauty

Wow, FF hasn’t been this difficult for me in a long time. The picture from Danny Bowman is so bleak and yet stunning, I wanted to do it justice with my story, but the ideas clanked out slowly and the resulting first draft was much too long and pointless to be worth sharing. Sometimes, the muse just doesn’t want to get out of bed – I know how she feels!

But here, at last, it my offering. I hope it’s worth the wait.

Preserving Beauty

Marie nipped the flower from a crevice in the rock and into her book. She glanced around and sighed. In preserving beauty, she had crushed the volcano’s only hope of bearing life.

Tears blinded her as she stumbled back to the Observation Station. She and Louis had shared a hope once, but she too was barren wasteland.

“I ruin everything,” she sobbed.

“Another quake,” he whispered. “We need to evacuate.”

Blackness seeped into the crevice, scorching roots and stem as the research team retreated. Tucked away, the hope of the mountain survived: pollen caught in the leaves of a sketchbook.

Friday Fictioneers – Far Afield

This week’s picture comes from Maggie Duncan, on Madison Woods’ site. There is something very British about the photo, but I have a feeling that’s more nostalgia in me than accurate geographical identification. I’d love to know where it’s taken though. It’s another landscape, and for me those are always harder than the close ups of something, so I thought I’d give you a taste of the longish story I’ve been wanting to write since the idea popped into my head recently. With luck, sometime I’ll have a chance to write the rest!

By way of background, you need to know that Piccolo is a cat who is trying to get home to his family. Which is another reason this picture made me want to write about him, because, as Maggie mentioned in her post, fog comes on little cat feet.

Far Afield

Piccolo batted a damp leaf from his nose and sniffed the air. He’d been dreaming of chasing the string bird around the bedroom with Dad, and the cold damp air around him came as a shock. It smelt strange – like spring and grass.

Peeking out from the bush, he felt a pang of loneliness. This place was nothing like home. There were no houses, no roads and the only sound was birds, too high to catch, in the branches above him. Ahead, the ground was invisible, blanketed in thick fog, dotted only with more trees, ghostly in their silhouettes.

Friday Fiction – The Buzzard

A little late, and a little light on picture, this is my Friday Fiction post, albeit it’s now Saturday. Since I’m away from my usual computer and internet connection, I can’t post the picture, but I thought I’d leave the words here for now and be back in a few days to beautify the post. As ever, comments are welcome, especially concrit.

The Buzzard

From forty feet above, on his bare-branch garret, the buzzard surveys his tundra lands. His rodent people scamper from sparse cover to sparse cover under his imperial gaze. King and God. Their attempts at self-preservation are based on credulous practices: offerings on sacred rocks, tenuous prayers and habits – each according to the traditions of its breed.

But the buzzard pays no heed. He is guided by his own faith. He knows the best offerings to appease his personal gods – the hunger that growls inside and the noisome offspring without. At last, his attack deified by speed, he swoops.