It’s Off To Work She Goes

This photo is today’s prompt for the Flash Friday challenge..

She was leaving town now. Her work was done.

Once she had been a simple schoolteacher, and engaged to be married. Then he’d died.

There had been an ambush in which he and his comrades had been killed. She had wept, pined, and drunk whisky by the bottle, because this was the Wild West, after all.

Then months later she’d heard of the mystery avenger, the man with the white hat, the mask, and the ridiculous silver bullets, as if he was up against werewolves.

She’d known straight away that it was him. He’d always been a show-off.

He hadn’t written, he hadn’t telegraphed, he hadn’t even got his friend to send smoke signals. He didn’t care.

So she had set out across Texas, always one town ahead of him, fighting crime in her own way just to annoy him. She wore a mask, simply because she was now single and it made her look hot.

Here in the town of Little Falls (the waterfalls are massive, as you can see, but this is Texas, remember) she had fought drunkenness with stern lectures. She had fought gambling with statistics about the odds against winning. She had fought bar-brawls by fighting everybody in the bar-brawls, because she was still a very angry woman.

Now she was on the bridge outside the town. She made sure she was in silhouette, because that was important. She knew that HE would have reared his horse at this stage, but she had tried that once and had ended up wearing her skirt over her face. She nudged her horse and slowly trotted away.

The townspeople watched her go.

“Who was that masked woman?” asked one of them.

“That was Joan Ranger,” someone replied.

Advertisements

Change Of Venue

This is the photo prompt for this week’s Flash Frenzy challenge…

Joe’s Speakeasy was packed, as it always was.

The men had loud voices and louder tie-pins. The woman had cigarettes in long holders and dresses that shimmered, like a waterfall on a windy day, when they walked.

Then Brad Spencer had arrived, given the Doorman the password (“I’ve got money to spend”) and been admitted.

“It’s over!” he shouted.

“What is?” asked Sherwood Stewart, sitting at the bar.

“Prohibition,” said Brad. “They’ve just repealed it.” He turned back to the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Joe.

“O’Malley’s,” said Brad, “the Irish Bar on the corner.”

“How can there be a bar on the corner already?” asked Sherwood.

Brad shrugged. “You can throw up an Irish Bar in a couple of hours,” he said. “You buy a couple of cardboard shamrocks, give your bar-staff T-shirts saying ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ and pay a guy a few bucks to sit in the corner and sing ‘Danny Boy’ with one hand over his ear.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Sherwood.

“You can’t seriously be thinking of going,” said Joe desperately. “You’ve all been drinking here for years. It’s where everybody knows your name.”

“That’s not always a good thing,” said Algernona Black, whose parents had wanted a boy.

“Look,” said Brad, “O’Malley will sell whiskey that isn’t made of turpentine and tabasco (Joe had the grace to blush) and gin that doesn’t give you hallucinations. Plus he’ll sell Guinness.”

“What’s Guinness?” asked a man in a fedora (just because everybody knows your name, it doesn’t mean they can always remember it).

“It’s a black drink with a white head,” said Sherwood. “It’s practically Irishness in liquid form. It looks like a nun in a glass, and drinking it can make you fart the tune to ‘Toora-Loora-Loora’, though not always intentionally.”

“I’ll get some in,” said Joe, already planning a recipe that involved sump-oil and wedding-cake icing. “Look, you don’t really want to go to an Irish Bar. There’ll be brawls and bare-knuckle boxing.”

“Whereas here,” said Algernona, “we have police raids and drive-by machine-gunnings.”

And with that they were gone. Algernona hadn’t even finished her drink.

 

Frozen In Time

This photo, by Ashwin Rao, is this weekend’s Flash Frenzy challenge. Our story has to have less than 360 words, so at least I managed that…

Deep below the ocean lies the Crustacean Cryonics lab.

It was founded by Krusty the Crab (his mother was a Simpsons fan) and his clients, the Crabwise, as he refers to them, lie in wait for a world in which their claws are not considered delicacies, in which curious children do not lift them up to see if they run on wheels, and in which innocent Irish people trying to write a story can Google “crabs” without learning far more than they wanted to about lower body disorders.

They also dream of a time when the English join the rest of the world by walking sideways to the right.

Wheels Set In Motion

This photo, by Ashwin Rao, is the prompt for this weekend’s Flash Frenzy challenge…

They lined the street like ladies of the night, though cheaper to hire.

Their shift was over for the day. They were tired, dusty and had chewing-gum stuck in their tyre-treads. Most of all they were saddle-sore, the human equivalent of a migraine. Having someone sit on your head all day does that to you.

They worked in the cultural quarter of Dublin, available for short-term rent to tourists. Now, like men on bar-stools, they unwound by complaining about their day.

Bike Two had been cycled on the wrong side of the road, a common mistake made by tourists. Bike Seven’s rider hadn’t been on a bicycle for thirty years, and had picked him up and carried him around every corner.

Bike Five had got his wheel stuck in the tramlines, and had watched in horror, like Penelope Pitstop tied to a railway track, as the tram bore down upon him. His rider had wrenched him free at the last second.

Bike Four claimed that a truck had backed out in front of him, and he and his rider had had to slide under it. The others laughingly told him that he had seen too many movies, which was a pity, because it had actually happened. Indeed, they had also cycled through a line of washing, but Bike Four decided that there was no point in mentioning that.

Bike One had got a flat tyre. To a bicycle the sensation of this is rather like what a human would feel if one buttock deflated.

They all agreed, though, that Bike Number Three had had the toughest day. He had been ridden through the old part of the city, along cobblestones, and this had driven his head down into his neck as far as his crossbar.

In Your Face

This photo, by Ashwin Rao, is the prompt for this week’s Flash Frenzy challenge…

The shrine is in a diner in the tiny town of Bedd Springs, Idaho.

This is because there are not many disciples of the Cult of Tash, the Goddess of Moustaches. No woman, for instance, has ever prayed to Tash to bless them with facial carpeting.

The Goddess is depicted as a cat, because they have whiskers, the animal equivalent of a moustache. Legend has it that she grew her middle whisker until it doubled as an eyebrow, and this is why she has a following among men who would never dream of training the hair on their head into a depiction of, say, Sydney Opera House, but who regard a moustache the length of a cello bow as the height of hirsute art.

Among her acolytes have been Groucho Marx, Salvador Dali and Dick Dastardly.

At her feet are her children – on her left foot, in her sleeping bag, is Katnap, the Goddess of Snoozing In Front Of The TV. On her right foot are the twins, Puss and Boots, Gods of Pus, Boots, and Ill-fitting Footwear.

When it comes to selling souvenirs nothing is sacred, not even something sacred, so supplicants can buy small bottles decanted from the products arranged around Tash. The bottle behind her to her right is moustache dye, for dark-haired men who embarrassingly find that their moustache has grown ginger.

The bottle to her right is vinegar and has been left there by mistake, it was supposed to have been on one of the diner tables.

The almost-empty bottle nearest us contains earwax, because a true believer will buy anything.

Most of the pilgrims who visit the shrine are adolescents anxious to prove their graduation into manhood by growing a hedge upon their face. As we watch here one is approaching, bearing the traditional bowl of cat food. Since Tash does not approve of food made from cats, this is a mistake.

That’s why all teenagers’ first attempts at a moustache make them look as if their face has been attacked by a dandelion clock.

Birdie Attempt

This photo, by TheShakes72, was the prompt for this weekend’s Flash Frenzy challenge…

If you close your eyes you can almost hear the voice of David Attenborough:

“And here. In the long. Grasses the male slowly. Fans. His tail.”

Almost is the important word, though, because David Attenborough has never observed the mating ritual of the male golf ball. No-one has.

People assume that golf balls are manufactured, despite the fact that no-one lives near a golf ball factory and that no-one has ever met anybody who works in one. In fact the golf ball is an animal, and one of the most remarkable species on the planet.

Their natural habitat is the golf course, where they are equally at home in deep sand, underwater, or stuck halfway up a tree. Their breeding ground, though, is in the long grass known as “the rough”, for reasons lost, probably thankfully, in the mists of time.

While salmon struggle upstream to their breeding grounds, and while birds fly through rain, shotgun pellets and small children’s escaped balloons to theirs, the golf ball is clever enough to get humans to drive them to theirs. They have developed remarkably tough hides, and the thump of a golf club feels as gentle to them as a pat on the rump does to a horse. The resulting high-speed journey is so exhilarating that as they leave the tee you can hear them shout “wheeee!”

The humans, without fail, hit the balls into the rough. Nature has programmed them to do this.

When a male golf ball meets a female it fans its tail. The tail looks like a shuttlecock covered in gaudy flowers, and to be honest makes the male look like a bit of a pillock, though in this he is no different to any other male in any other species trying to show off in front of a girl.

If the female is attracted she responds by showing her dimples.

What happens next is unclear, and rightly so. No-one ever asks, for instance, how giraffes do it without toppling over sideways. No-one asks about the sex-life of the hedgehog. Or the Dalek.

Some things should just remain private.

Cat’s Eyes

This photo is the prompt for today’s Flash Frenzy challenge…..

She was the only one left.

Well, apart from the sloth behind her, who was too lazy to move. Creatures get names for a reason.

The trip had been a disaster from the start, and she blamed the humans. To begin with the Ark was about twenty per cent too small, purely because Noah had been unwilling to admit to God that he had no idea what a cubit was. The cramped living conditions had led to cross animals, cross-species animosity and even cross-breeding. The raccoon, for example, had come about after a koala-bear had bred with a zebra.

Each day the Ark sat a little lower in the water, partly because it was filling up with an astonishing amount and variety of poo, and partly because it was now home to 14,279 rabbits.

But day by day the flood was abating, and this morning the Ark had come to rest on the crest of Mount Ararat. And had promptly toppled over.

All of the creatures had tumbled to one side. One of the elephants had landed on a unicorn. The unicorn was now as dead as the dodo, which had been landed on by the other one.

Animals and humans alike had fled, in fear that the Ark might topple again, snowball-like, down the side of the Mount, with them flailing and tangling inside it like socks in a washing-machine.

She watched them now, swimming towards another hill a few hundred yards away, and she knew that she was going to have to do it too. She steeled herself, took a really deep breath, and for the first time ever a cat entered water.

And as she did so she made a solemn vow to herself that she would never forgive humankind, and that her scorn would pass from generation to generation, like freckles.

So when your cat looks at you in utter contempt, or ignores you altogether, or comes in from the garden and drops half a dead mouse onto you newly-cleaned kitchen floor, then this is the reason.

It is because of the covenant of the Ark.