Tag Short Story

Fevered – Alastair’s Photo Fiction

freyathewriter 16 Comments

Here is my offering for Alastair’s Photo Fiction this week, inspired by the photo below.  Why not take part? And why not visit his photography and writing blog to take a look at his other photos…?

Copyright - Kattermonran

Copyright – Kattermonran

– Fevered –

I will never reach the end – the heat will sear me like meat on a spit. I imagine my hair crackling and frizzing, my skin crisping.

We are all but flesh.

I pause, blinking against the searing sweat flooding my eyes. The sting takes me back to a buried schoolgirl memory; a cross-country run in freezing January, the finale a lung-bursting incline to the crematorium.  The irony is not lost on me.

I would kill for that biting wind, for breath torn from my chest in frozen gasps, for skin encased with gooseflesh. Now all we have is a furious orange sun, farther away from our planet than ever, yet burning us alive latitude by latitude.

Winter is a myth.

I wipe my eyes against a sweat-soaked shirtsleeve and resume my climb. 

Y Diflannu – VisDare 35

freyathewriter 17 Comments

Here’s my latest offering for Anonymous Legacy‘s photo-inspired prompt, VisDare. This week’s prompt word is ‘Ephemeral’. The rules are simple:

150 words – or less.

Post entry to your blog and “link in”.

(Please – no erotica or graphic violence.)

DON’T FORGET to read and comment on others’ entries!!

The photo is below, and my piece follows. Let me know what you think, and give it a go yourself, why not?

– Y Diflannu – 

I told them, over and over again ‘Don’t go down Glyndwr Street’. What a fool I was.

It was the summer holidays, a delightful oasis for them, a seemingly endless trial for me. I had run out of patience and shouted at them to get out of my hair.

The peace and quiet was such a relief.

Until they didn’t come back at tea-time, ransacking the kitchen cupboards for biscuits, crisps and orange squash.

I knew.

I ran as if wings had sprouted from my feet. I got there just in time to see them skipping off into the distance, holding hands. I stared as their shadows grew dark, as my darling girls faded and disappeared.

There they are now, forever embedded in the paving stones, together with remnants of the other careless souls.

Sometimes, I want to join them.

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**** Y Diflannu – The Disappeared

Ysbryd Y Mwynwyr – Five Sentence Fiction

freyathewriter 8 Comments

It’s time for my latest offering to Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction, a weekly prompt where there is no word limit, just a limit on the number of sentences. Plus, although she provides a word prompt, it is just for direction only – you don’t have to include the word itself in your contribution.

This week, the prompt is  – THUNDER.

Do let me know what you think of my offering below – and whilst you’re at it, why not take a look at everyone else’s offerings (I’m sure they’ll be fabulous), and even give it a go yourself…

*****

– Ysbryd y Mwynwyr –

If you lay your hands flat against the earth, you can feel the souls of the lost and the forgotten reaching out to you for recognition.

I feel that here, even on a cheerful day in August; the scars incised on the landscape, the tumbledown mine-workings, the iron ore spilling its livid orange hue over smooth stones ensconced in the glass-clear streams – these are the obvious markers of times past.

Pause for a moment, tune your ears to the undertow that pulls your heart, your thoughts, your very breath past the calm sounds of nature; beyond the brook burbling at your feet, beyond the birds soaring in the azure above your head.

This serene valley was once filled with the roar of vast waterwheels, smoke, steam, pounding hammers and picks, chipping and hacking and the shouting of men.

The thunder of industry echoed around these mountains; the clamour of humanity, the spirit of the miners, reverberates within us now, never to be lost.

Copyright - Freya

Copyright – Freya

Lillie McFerrin Writes

*** Ysbryd Y Mwynwyr is Welsh and means Spirit of the Miners. It is a community regeneration project that set out to create an identity for northern Ceredigion using the legacy of metal mining as a theme for regeneration. The project mainly focused on the human, social and community aspects of mining culture. In short, the very reason why many of the upland villages exist. Please see the Ysbryd Y Mwnwyr website for further information, and if you ever visit Wales, I can highly recommend the area as a region to visit. It is stunning.