The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty The yellow crane stunned him. Now? That color here at the weekly update meant what it meant. Shaking, he sent the text. * * * He hoped she came today, the smoldering redhead at the arboretum the last couple of weeks. She’d sit at noon and launch a white paper crane. She was […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty The place was a time machine. The old man sat near where he’d sat as a boy with his grandfather, near where gramps had perched high in a tree as a boy watching the carnage in that Northern Virginia field. He was an historian. His knowledge enhanced gramp’s tale, viewing carnage of blue- […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty They finished as a study in contrast. He held out an impossibly long B♭ through circular breathing. Her fluid, gravity-mocking ballet ended with a mime’s frozen pose. He was darkness against her light; sound to her silence; a relaxed, seated posture verses her precisely posed angles. Their magical father/daughter routine was performed weekly. […]

Friday FictionPoetry: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Darleen offered a thoughtful mood set to music, and I’ll reply with a bit of verse: Your life’s a book, brief or dense And though we live in the present tense Parts boring, or all suspsense We cannot change the pacing No, time’s the same for rich or poor Until the pages are […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty The flood abated, and Korban son of Korbill surveyed the ruin by the light of a harvest moon. He and his archers had climbed high in a thick copse of trees on a flanking hill as the orc horde forded River Myzods. The arrival of the flood waters had taken out half of […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Torn, bleeding, naked, the little girl managed to pull herself up the river bank, miles downstream from the wreck of the family fishing trip. Years on, she would wonder why God had even bothered to spare her, alone, while so cruelly taking her parents and siblings. She never had an explicit answer under […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty God’s purposes could be mysterious, he thought, gazing at the photo of his hand in his mother’s as she passed from the trauma of bringing him into the world. When old enough to understand, he sardonically thought it a reverse abortion. He’d fallen in love rapidly with his darkly beautiful wife, Zorha. Their […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Granpda had a vision of his last look at the city. The hugest moon he’d ever seen, obscured by unnatural clouds. Bombers. A distant enemy had visited. A murder of ravens deployed from a lonely tree for the sudden necropolis. That had been decades ago. The country hadn’t recovered from electing foolish leaders […]

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