Flash Fiction – The Dice Pool

Flash Fiction Challenge Week 4: He Told Us

The news

Art is political. I might struggle to call what I make “art” most of the time but I guess, whether it’s good or bad, it’s still art. Some of it is more overtly political than others. You can certainly see the politics in NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels. It bristles and boils up and breaks the world, but it is still veiled by its fantasy setting. When you read her Great Cities books, based, as they are in her very real home of New York City, the place and the politics are the real deal. It’s right there on the page; the shit that people deal with every day even it is couched in fantastical occurrences and the antagonists are disguised behind cosmically horrific metaphor.

Usually, what I write lies in the former category but, today’s flash is jumping right out of the headlines. It came unbidden, I will say, but here it is. Take it for what it’s worth.

This is a flash fiction challenge where I challenge myself and anyone else who cares to take part to write a 500 word flash fiction piece every week. I generate five random nouns and five random verbs for each piece. Part of the challenge is to include all the words in the piece. Here are the words for this piece.

Nouns

crusade
cluster
drawer
railcar
turkey

Verbs

permit
stop
spring
control
fuck 1

He Told Us

by Ronan McNamee

He told us to permit no Rykerites. Neither should we tolerate a Jellicho to live amongst us. For we were the people of the one true god! Kark!

We joined together in a great convocation. We occupied Scotte Station and created of the railcars an impassable barrier. That’s how the Rylerites came to our great city, like diseased cells through the arteries of a body. We watched the trains burn from the terminal.

He told us to take back control so our crusade abandoned the useless railway and spread to the spokes of our great metropolis, the bridges. Those who could, exploded them, the rest of us smashed them, rammed them, blocked and burned them. No more Jenwayers coming across those bridges.

Finally, together on our island of freedom, we beat down doors, beat on drums, beat those damned heathens, the Forgistas. They didn’t belong here either.

He told us to clean the city and that’s what we did. We sprung traps for all the unwanted. We clustered them all in Liberty Gardens and watched them bobbing around in there, like livestock, like turkeys. We fenced them in and went home for dinner.

He told us to eat what the city produced. So we opened our pantries and explored the recesses of our drawers. We ate ketchup and pickles until our tongues fizzed and stung. We drank old soda and energy drinks until our teeth throbbed and our brains balked.

We looked across the barricades and threw obscenities at the filthy outsiders beyond. We returned to Liberty Gardens. The Rykerites and Jellichos had run out of condiments and own-brand cola. They lay in the dirt and we licked our lips.

He told us not to stop until they were gone. So we started and did not cease until we picked our teeth. We were free of them then. Or were we? Some of our crusaders continued to subsist on mayo and sherbet. They refused the “turkey.” They went back to their lives. Sympathisers. Vegetarians. Fuck them.

He told us to find the traitors and destroy them, hang them from the bridges and the tallest skyscrapers. And we did, though we kept a few to make up for the last of the city food. Great Kark would not begrudge his favoured people a good meal.

The eyes of the traitors looked down on us, as we basked in the streets, satiated. And I heard him tell the others to take us for anti-city behaviour. We ran and cried but finally obeyed the leader. We gave ourselves to the great people of our city and they fenced us in, fed us stale donuts and old olives until we lay in the dirt, doing what we were told until they came for us with belief and hunger in their eyes. Had Kark abandoned me? Was I no better than a Forgista now? I always did what I was told. Was this a reward?

He told us what he was, but we never listened.

Next week’s words

Here are the five nouns and five verbs to fit into next week’s piece:

Next week’s nouns

session
nature
wood
guest
membership

Next week’s verbs

dominate
slow
forbid
get
dictate

Happy writing!

Flash Fiction Challenge: Habitant 1306

Week 1

Predictably, I spent absolutely no time thinking about this challenge until yesterday and then I knocked out the five hundred words in an evening. No matter how I did it, though, I have a sense of accomplishment. It’s been such a long time since I wrote for the pleasure of it, I forgot what it was like. That slow unfurling of the story in my mind, the careful (or not so careful) selection of the words, the freedom to make it what it wants to be. I enjoyed it.

Anyway, the random words certainly helped get me started in this case. I had some images from other media in the forefront of my mind as I wrote. Aveena, the holographic assistant from the Citadel in the Mass Effect games was the first thing. But instead of a mysterious space station, it was the assistant for something like the arcologies in Appleseed, a manga that I read more than 30 years ago. I remember almost nothing about it except for the arcologies, which I thought were a pretty cool concept. Habitant 1306 is the result. Here’s the list of the random words that I managed to fit into it first.

Nouns

Development
Surgery
Union
Shopping
System

Verbs

Execute
Finish
Approve
Undertake
Take

Habitant 1306

By Ronan McNamee

“The System is here to fulfil all of your needs, Habitant 1306.” The hologram flickered and flashed, blinding me momentarily. Why had it designated me Habitant 1306? I thumbed my eyes and walked on past it. It felt like a haunting, but not the one I would want. The vastness of the Development’s central atrium bloomed around me, twilit and dripping. I pulled Aunty’s scarf tight.

Maybe it knew me? The cracked and mossy statue of a habitant, gaily swinging their shopping bags winked at me, I’m certain. Did the statue know me too, somehow? Spiders crawled up my spine. I whipped about but caught only the brief flicker of the hologram, awaiting the next habitant. It might wait forever.

What if it mistook me for someone else? Perhaps Habitant 1306 looked like me. What if 1306 was the designation, not just of habitant, but also habitation? An “i” towered, gallingly tall, above a booth, hunkered between ATM and escalator. A gentle glow beneath an encrustation of grime drew me in. With a wipe I discovered a map on a screen. Below, the development delved deep. Caverns occupied by industry, commerce, leisure. Above me, the habitations stretched high into the night sky.

Developers had undertaken the doomed project; the union of all aspects of life in a System-governed space. Self-sustaining, self-regulating, self-populating… 1306 was far above. There were elevators but I didn’t trust them not to take me where they wanted. A stairwell, housed in a tall glass tube, spiralled into the heavens. I stretched, knowing Aunty would approve, and started the climb. Every few landings, a gap in the Development’s titanic cladding allowed the Free City streets to shine out below. My home, where Aunty found me as a nipper, clad in my birthday suit, exploring, unworried and unhurried, she told me.

13 sounds doable, but each floor encompasses cities. Peach streaked the horizon as I finished with the stairs. 06 was on a low inter-level. The halls’ walls and ceilings had partially collapsed. Utility cabling and piping barricaded the way. The Development’s arteries blocking my path to the heart. I had surgery to perform. I hefted my idle crowbar and scrubbed in.

Shocked, soaked and stinking, I left the patient bleeding behind me, crawling to the end of the hall. Forty winks, Aunty found me. She scowled with that smile hiding behind. Only ever in the electrified darkness inside my eyelids, these days. I thumbed my eyes to clear them again, rose and stretched.

1306 said the door. “Everyone left you,” I said to the Development or the door, maybe. Touched, it swung sullenly open. Illumination blossomed. It was a home. Unobtrusive conveniences skulked, observing my steps. But still, a sort of habitation to be sure.

A closet? Located dead-centre, it buzzed and gurgled. Inside was a tall mirror. No, I switched the light on and saw me, in my birthday suit, watching Aunty. The pink water bubbled. A single word question blinked on the tank’s surface, “Execute?”

Next week’s words

And here are the random words generated for next week’s challenge.

Next week’s nouns

measurement
consequence
desk
winner
employer

Next week’s verbs

echo
influence
enquire
mix
pin

I’d love to hear from you if you took part in the challenge this week, dear reader, or if you wrote anything you’re satisfied with in the last few days, even. Get in the comments!

Short Fiction Challenge

These are not resolutions, okay?

Yes, I wrote all the way back last year, that I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions. So much so that I then proceeded to list five of them, with the proviso that they were “gaming resolutions,” not real ones. So, I may as well continue along Self-Delusion Avenue into 2025, I thought.

So! There are a couple of non-RPG things I’d like to try to do more often:

Practice my Japanese and improve my fluency before our big trip to Japan in the autumn
Write more fiction that is not related to games

The cover of the book, Read Real Japanese Fiction, Edited by Michael Emmerich and featuring the writing of Hiromi Kawaguchi, Otsuichi, Sinji Ishii, Banana Yoshimoto, Kaoru Kitamura and Yoko Tawada. It also features the illustration of a small, angry, barefoot child with a light blue dress on.

日本語の練習は大変だけど楽しいです。最近　Read Real Japanese　Fiction　という本を読み始まりました。その本の中には日本の著者六人のすばらしい短編小説が読めます。一文ずつ、英語の説明もあるから分かりやすいです。それ以外、Netflixで日本のテレビ番組をよく見て日本語のリスニングの練習もできます。日本語を話すことの練習もできればいいな。

A double-page spread from the book “Read Real Japanese Fiction.” This shows a page of the short story, Kamisama by Hiromi Kawaguchi and the opposite page with explanations in English for each sentence.

For the second point, I thought I might use this very blog, dear reader… and perhaps, dear fellow writer…

Random Word Generator

In a now defunct writing group I was once a part of, we often used a random word generator to get our minds working on new short pieces of fiction. In fact, some of the short stories and flash fiction I posted here came from that group. I think we can all agree that I had mixed success. But, there is no doubt about one thing: it got me writing. I always found that, when my brain was working on the practical problem of fitting those randomly selected words into whatever it was I was writing, I was not focusing so much on the fact that I didn’t have any ideas. I let the words guide me into something resembling a story. After a while, I found the ideas for short fiction coming without the aid of the random words and so I would have to shoe-horn them in, which is an interesting exercise in itself. But the random words were the kickstart that I needed.

So I decided to use the same method again. Here is my first effort. I used this random word generator to come up with five nouns and five verbs:

Nouns I used

Engine
Clothes
Thought
Employer
Investment

Verbs I used

Summon
Chase
Determine
Cheer
Assess

This time, I thought I would challenge myself to write in a format I don’t think I have ever attempted before, a hundred word flash.

Present Imperative

by Ronan McNamee

Swim. Up to the air. Breathe. Curse your clothes. They catch every eddy, urging a return to drowning. Locate your employer. She bobs there on the surface; regards the depths. Consider her investment in you. Learn from her mistakes. Recognise the ice of the sea in your bones. Move. Chase survival, success. Stroke past her and her solitary Chu. Welcome the deep-freeze motivation. Summon your future. Allow it to cheer you, sustain you. Pause, paddle. Resist the chill in your blood. Hear the engine enter earshot. Determine the direction. Assess difficulty and distance. Chatter a grin. Swim.

Next Challenge

Five verbs: execute, finish, approve, undertake, take. Five nouns: development, surgery, union, shopping, system — The Randomly Generated words to use in writing the 500 word flash fiction due on Wednesday, 15th January, 2025.

Here’s the plan. I’m going to generate five more nouns and five more verbs right now. I am going to take these words and come up with a 500 word piece of flash fiction. If you’re interested, dear reader, I would invite you to do the same. I’m going to post my piece on this here blog next Wednesday. If you want, you can leave yours as a comment under this post or under my post next week or on your own blog and link to it, or you can write it in that little notebook you keep just for yourself, or you can write it on the wind so only the birds and the gods can read it.

Here are the words for next week:

Nouns for next week

development
surgery
union
shopping
system

Verbs for next week

execute
finish
approve
undertake
take

And this is the best part: I’m going to do this every Wednesday until I decide I’ve done enough. Feel free to join me in this weekly writing challenge, dear reader. Or maybe just try it this once and see if you like it. One way or the other、よろしくお願いします。

Flash Fiction: Potential

Competition

I used to love to take part in the flash fiction competitions held on the Escape Artists Forums. I think I have mentioned that before. I would read and re-read every entry, and vote in each round. The work of writing the actual flash fiction stories was instrumental in my development as a writer but reading and critiquing literally hundreds of flash stories over the years also helped me understand what to avoid and what to emulate. If you are an aspiring writer, you could do a lot worse than to take part in contests like this. It looks like the last one they held was a couple of years ago so they are about due for another one soon. Also, if you win, they reproduce it on one of their podcasts! Check them out at the link above.

Anyway, this is one of my more successful efforts. “Potential” got to the semi-finals of the contest for Escape Pod in 2018. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader.

Potential

by Ronan McNamee

“Do you remember the Earth, Momma?” Kevin bounced between ceiling and floor. Liberty couldn’t watch without nausea nibbling. She stood before their darkened porthole, preparing silver-packed lunches.

She sighed. “How many times, Kev? Why keep asking this question?”

Kevin’s reflection shrugged in the porthole.

Liberty knew why: he didn’t believe her answer. To her son, Earth was Heaven, the Happy Hunting Grounds, Valhalla; but he believed in it utterly. Of course he didn’t believe her.

“Did you ever see a bison, Momma?” Kevin performed his final dismount from the ceiling, not with a flourish but with a fart.

“Kevin!”

“I couldn’t help it!”

Shaking her head, suppressing giggles, Liberty rhymed off her standard response: “The bisons are all gone, my love, just like the pandas, turtles, codfishes. That Earth is dying, but we’re still here, L’il Kev. Our future is out there.”

Kevin shook his head and smiled wide. Wink! And he pushed off to the back of their cozy capsule. He began boxing a teddy in the face.

She would never convince him.

No need, she thought, in two more years, we’ll be out of here and escaping this graveyard. He’ll have to believe it. Or will he? Even then? Is there anything I can show him, or anything those scientists can say to make him understand the truth.

“It’s my own fault,” said Liberty softly into her panini. “I shouldn’t have told you this was a spaceship. But you’re my only company: had to console you somehow.” Louder, “Come and eat your lunch, L’il Kev.”

Kevin looked upon his defeated enemy, nodded once and floated over to her.

She handed him his panini, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry I got us into this but it’ll be worth it in the end.” He gave her a cocked head and a scrunched-up puzzled face, grabbed the package and flew off again, laughing, waving his lunch at the porthole. Globs of mayonnaise and molten emmental exploded from it. Liberty winced. She knew the equipment was delicate but Kevin’s potential energy was often released in damaging ways; he was a bored six-year-old. Knuckling her eyes, she began her mantra, “It’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll b-“ Liberty’s nostrils twitched: smoke…

Kevin had abandoned his sandwich mid-capsule while he pretended to shoot her with a defunct thermoglue gun. “Pchew! Pchew!” He noticed nothing.

Liberty floated around, sniffing. She strained to listen but Kevin was too loud. Pleading was futile.

Liberty retrieved the extinguisher and flew about, blindly. The cabin filled with smoke. She began to panic when she heard, “Simulation ended.” Her son bawled. She looked around at him in the next booth.

A white coat loomed above her, “The trial is over, Liberty.” She shook her head, tears stinging.

“You were unable to maintain your capsule… your ticket off world is revoked.”

“No,” she whispered.

“You’ll be staying here on Earth. We thank you for your time.”

Eyes Open

“You see over yonder, Ollie?” Ollie’s father roughly jabbed him with his bony elbow. the man’s digit described the glowing tree-line at the foot of the hill. “That’s where they are. Should’ve burned it down years ago.”
His dad shook his head. “Never should’ve let them in in the first place!”
“Someone has to act, and it’s going to be us, boy!” Ollie stepped back as his father stepped forward, lighting a torch and holding it aloft in the night air. It illuminated the burning shield tattooed on his neck.
Like moths Ollie’s eyes were drawn to the flame. Its white-hot heart drew a memory on his retinas:

The Folk were caught off-guard by the attack of their allies, the people of the Kingdom. The Folk had cured their poxes and healed their wounds. They had promised they always would in return for peace. But the King’s subjects feared the Folk more than they valued peace. The Folk and their woods burned as the people howled and chopped and marshalled the inferno.

Ollie followed his father a few yards behind out of fear.
“They’re an infection, son! We have to burn them out of our community!”
Ollie stepped in a puddle near the foot of the hill. The water’s dark mirror reflected another memory:

A woman of the Folk, aglow with forest magic, laid hands on the ruined leg of a warrior. A woman of the Kingdom loomed behind her. As the knight’s limb was made whole the woman shoved the healer back into the city’s dirt where they had found her, spat and laughed.

Ollie stumbled in his father’s wake.
“Come along, boy! We took them into our civilisation when they had nowhere else to go. What did we get for our troubles? Knives in the back! Why wouldn’t they want our great Kingdom leading them, protecting them, showing them the right path? Eh?”
Ollie no longer heard. He rose and peered into the clouds above. Their wisps revealed a new memory:

A man of the Folk, all but invisible in black, dropped from ornate rafters onto the King’s throne. He roared in pent-up rage as he sucked the life from the monarch. The man’s body, pustulating and poxy, tumbled to the floor beside the King’s, just as dead.
The Kingdom drowned all the Folks’ children.

Ollie’s father approached the trees.
“The last of them live in this fairy-ring, Ollie. We’ll be heroes when we cure this infection!”
Ollie ran to the first great ash. His eyes peered into the swirl of an ancient knot:

A slender hand reached through a window to enact a terrible trade, one tiny boy of the kingdom for another identical one. The be-glamoured and bundled cuckoo screamed and a man came to attend. He held the child tenderly to his face, right by the flaming buckler emblazoned below his ear.

“No, Dad. We’ll cure you instead.” Ollie began to glow with forest light.

Flash Fiction – Finnabar’s Relative Reconciliation

500 Words

For a while there, I was a part of a small writing group. We used to come up with random prompts or a selection of nouns and verbs and make flash fiction story out of them. They generally had to be 500 words long andinclude those randomly selcted words. It was a fun and interesting challenge and the results were always fascinating because each of us would end up with such different and idiosyncratic pieces. This was good practice for a series of flash fiction contests I entered on the Escape Artists forums. Escape Artists produce such long-running and luminary genre fiction podcasts as Podcastle, Escape Pod and Pseudopod. You should check them out. Anyway, if you were a contest winner, the prize was usually to be published and read on one of the shows. I also just really enjoyed reading all the submissions in the contests and voting on them too. I never did that great in the contests, I think the best I got was a quarter-final place, but taking part taught me a lot. The main lesson was editing. In 500 words, there is nowhere to hide. You have to choose every word deliberately and you must be brutal towards your own work. I also discovered that originality of story and format proved popular among the voters on the forums.

So this work is an attempt at both. But it is also one that I never submitted to a contest. I don’t precisely remember why. But anyway, maybe you will be able to enjoy it here, dear reader.

Finnabar’s Relative Reconciliation: A spell used to bring accord between two riven kin.

Material Components

The two subjects of the spell. They must be present in the same room as the performer of the spell. (Convincing both parties to do this may be the single thorniest aspect of this spell. I suggest deception. If that is not your forte recruit the aid of one more suited to the task. If all else fails, refer to a spell of my own composition, Finnabar’s Enchanting Eyebrows, also published in this compendium. I used this method to draw my siblings together against their wills. I reiterate that it should be used only as a last resort.)
Three hairs, two feet long, plucked from the human heads of three were-creatures, a fox representing deception and adaptability, a rat to represent betrayal and creativity and a wolf as a symbol of both fear and path-finding. Please note that these must be given with consent. You will find a sample consent form overleaf. It is wise to expect to pay a price for these components. I was not so wise and now dread the inevitable waxing of the moon.
An article of significance to the family as a focus. The painting of a respected ancestor, a piece of jewellery belonging to a beloved relation or an ancient heirloom. Personally, I chose a bust of our esteemed father. A poor choice. I was previously unaware of one sibling’s true feelings regarding our patriarch so it served to disrupt the spell rather than focus it.

Performance

The first step of the performance rests in the hands of the subjects, rather than the performer. They begin by standing eighteen inches apart and greeting each other. Their resistance to this may be strong. In my case it was strong enough to break the suggestion caused by my eyebrows when the greetings were uttered. Once that had occurred, however, they both remained close enough that I was able to proceed with the next step.
Tie the fox hair around the wrists of one subject and the rat hair around the wrists of the other. Join the two together with the wolf hair. I had great difficulty in completing this step while both siblings stood over me, shoving fingers in my face and yelling. I was forced to use another spell, Finnabar’s Restrictive Rope, from my first grimoire.
Finally, perform a simple Shanahan’s shuffle and produce an eldritch flame from the focus object to engulf the binding hairs. There will be peace between your subjects. In my case, I assume the use of the wrong focus caused a rift between my siblings and I, for should they not have appreciated my help?

NB – I cannot over-emphasise that you should heed the warnings I have peppered in the text of this spell. If you do not, the consequences can be monstrous. Also, if a fellow mage wishes to practice the performance of the spell a couple of times while assisting me, please contact me with urgency.