After the Rain

The sky was a miserable grey over the abandoned, rain-drenched pier as she stood on the very edge, looking into the beckoning deep, feeling the damp in her bones.

At the last moment, she took a breath and looked up to see a sky lit up by the shimmering bands of a rainbow.

She walked home, watching how the light played in the puddles and smelling that wonderful after-rain smell.

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This for Three Line Tales, Week 192. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Sara Riaño for providing the prompt photo!

 

The Abbot’s Afternoon Off

It would be five hundred years that Thursday since the monks had begun their long watch of the Sleeper Who Must Not Wake, keeping up a constant chant and a constant vigil.

Since in those five hundred years (give or take a day), the Sleeper had done nothing of interest and shown no sign of doing anything but mummifying, the Abbot decided he could take an afternoon to head down to the village and try some of the local, artisanal coffee the tourists were always going on about.

He had been there thirty minutes when he saw dark clouds gathering about the mountain.

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This is for Three Line Tales, Week 187. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Manthan Gupta for providing the prompt photo!

Equine Conversations

There was once a girl who could talk to horses. This would have been a better gift if horses had anything interesting to say, but horses were not renowned for their conversational skills.

She did enjoy telling them who to kick.

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This is for Three Line Tales, Week 186. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Melanie Dretvic for providing the prompt photo!

Numerology

They make their mark, beneath broken glass, while the alarms sound. One keeps watch for police with itchy trigger fingers while the others laugh.

Numbers have meaning and theirs mean this: that the world is over, that meaning is over, and they will make something new.

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This is for Three Line Tales, Week 185. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Leon Bublitz for providing the prompt photo!

After the Crash

The crash left him gasping burning air, his head aching, scrabbling to tear himself free of the chair. Above, silhouettes gathered, their faces hidden in shadows.

A flag waved overhead, but with the light behind it, he could not tell whether it was theirs or the enemy’s.

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This is for Three Line Tales, Week 183. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Marcus Wallis for providing the prompt photo!

With Eyes like Starlight

She loved an elf with eyes like starlight, bright and unfading, and that was her curse, because for the elf each day was as the day before and those eyes were unchanging, while hers grew dim with the crawl of time.

And when she looked into those beloved eyes, she knew that she could never really understand what lay beneath them, no more than she could know what lay beyond the sky.

But she still she loved her elf, because she could not understand love either.

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This is for Three Line Tales, Week 182. Thanks to Sonya for running the challenge and Rikki Austin for providing the prompt photo!

A Pale and Lidless Eye

As a child she had nightmares of the man in the moon, a face twisting slowly in cold and distant rock, and she would wake screaming. Her parents bought her books, showed her documentaries, tried to tell her there was nothing there, just stone and dust and flags held up with wire, frozen in a windless sky, but they were never enough to stop the nightmares.

Only years later, when she stood on that dusty grey ground gazing at the Earth below, did the nightmares finally end.

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This is for Three Line Tales Week 181. Thanks as always to Sonya for running the challenge and apologies for all the weeks I’ve missed! Photo taken by Neil Armstrong. 

Trying to get back into the habit of doing these – and of actually posting stuff on here.