Writing Prompt: Write a scene emulating the prose of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Focus on third-person close narrator point-of-view.

Naphtali Archeron knelt on the cracked surface of the Wasteland. Her splayed fingers barely touched the ruined earth as though she feared its corruption would spread to her. Nazca was to her back. Its monolithic buildings abandoned by the Ancients stood sentinel atop the horizon. The distant city wavered like a hazy mirage from the distance and the heat that baked the Wasteland. The Wasteland was all around them. The city. Naphtali. Her crew. They were all that decorated the seemingly endless stretch of dead land.

Ahead of Naphtali rose the remains of the archaeological dig site Samara had enlisted her misfit crew to escort her to. The site was dominated by a half-buried Ancientech drill that resembled a massive centipede lashed to the ground by wires and cables protruding from its sides. More technology that did not belong to them. It was the Ancients’. But the New Nations saw only the supposed advantages of the Restorians, reverse engineering Ancientech and magitech. Not the dangers. Even after the catastrophe at Zarephath. Dig sites continued to sprout up anywhere a hint of ‘techs appeared. This particular dig site had already been used to explore what lay beneath the Wasteland. It had been abandoned by the archaeologues like the Ancients had abandoned Nazca. And Zarephath. And all the other lingering cities still left on the face of Phaedrana. What they left behind were like toys in a sandbox. Toys that the New Nations had no business playing with.

Samara Granseal continued to set up her equipment. Her work consumed her. As far as Naphtali could tell now that she had reached the dig site her escorts no longer existed. There was only the machine. Her work. Whatever magitech score she was so sure she would find. Such lust for a vanished civilizations scraps was beyond Naphtali’s understanding. She could be no help to the archaeologue. Which was fine by her. She wanted no part in this stupidity any more than she had already signed up for against her better judgment. But money was a bitch to come by for her and her ilk. Turning down work was just as foolish as venturing out to the Wasteland in search of ‘tech.

So instead she fished out a pre-rolled spliff of hinas from her duster. Lit it with a crude match. She took a long draw from it then made her way to Wyatt. He looked at her from behind his cobbled together spectacles as she approached. She looked like a desert phantom with her black military duster flapping chaotically in the sandy winds. When she reached him she knelt down beside him and looked at the device he was tinkering with. It was a slender electronic device with a series of unlit rectangular lights on one side. Wyatt had popped the back off and was realigning the wires. She spoke to him in a whisper so quiet the winds threatened to steal her words. Continue Reading…

Writing Prompt: Write a story (at least 900 words) about a $5 bill that is handed off between at least three people. Focus on character development and scene.

Naphtali Archeron’s apartment could at best be described as spartan. It was spacious, taking up the entire third floor of a three-story building close to the edge of West Nazca and Center City. She had occupied the place for the better part of a half-decade since her return from Zarephath, but in all that time had added little to the wood floor and faded white plaster walls of the apartment’s natural state.

Presently, Naphtali sat in her kitchen at the end of a small, rectangular table, Wyatt Learyn seated opposite her. Naphtali leaned into a plain wooden chair, her right arm resting across the top of the chair and her legs crossed, the chair chipped and scraped, worn from time. Like most of her few possessions, she had salvaged it from wherever it had been discarded in the city, valuing function over form. Naphtali was at the head of the table, the end closest to the door. Unlike Naphtali, Wyatt sat hunched over, his hair—recently cropped short on the sides but left long on the top like a horse’s mane—spilled forward, obscuring his face while he furiously attacked his sketchbook with his pencil. Every now and then he’d look up and steal a glance at Naphtali, then return to drawing. The rhythmic scratching of his pencil was the only sound in the otherwise silent apartment.

As he sketched away quietly, stopping occasionally to push up his cobbled together eyeglasses every time they slid down his nose, it occurred to Wyatt that, in a way, the emptiness of her apartment was reminiscent of Naphtali herself, who had become rather reticent after the end of their tour at the warfront. At first, he attributed her sparsely decorated apartment as a byproduct of her upbringing, one of constant travel and relocation that forced her to never accumulate many material possessions since her family was always on the move. But since returning to Nazca, Naphtali had remained withdrawn, and Wyatt now saw in her apartment a reflection of that. A general detachment forged in the fires of Zarephath.

Besides the table and three chairs, the kitchen was little more than a hallway, with slender windows to Wyatt’s right and chestnut cabinets to his left. A hazy gray light poured in from the windows, dark skies announcing a coming storm. He could smell its imminent arrival, the air pushed down by the buildup of rain, filling the city with that distinct pre-rain scent. That scent mingled with the smoky residue of Naphtali’s last and cumulative smokes, giving her apartment its own unique odor. Behind Wyatt was a pantry cut into the far back wall, mostly devoid of food. Instead, it housed an assortment of liquors—whiskey, Black Blood Whiskey primarily, along with a few bottles of rum and tonic water. Naphtali currently cradled a half-empty tumbler of Black Blood in her left hand.

Time inched forward, kept only by the scratchy progress of whatever Wyatt scrawled in his sketchbook. The next hour seemed to squeeze into long minutes and even longer seconds before there finally came a knock on the door. Naphtali raised the tumbler to her lips, threw her head back, and poured the remainder of its contents straight down her throat, the searing sensation that followed causing her to lick her gums. The warmth that flowed back up was an old, welcome friend. Satisfied, she stood up slowly, smoothed out her long duster, pushed back her bushy tangle of curly black hair, then made her way to the door and opened it wide. Continue Reading…

Writing Prompt: This was a self-imposed writing prompt. Something about this particular edition’s cover of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse compelled me to write a story based off the cover image. I also decided to set it in the same world as the larger story project I’m currently working on. My (self-)instructions: Write a story about this picture (below). Who are the people at the beach? What are they doing? What is the structure in the background? Tell it in under 1000 words.

“What do you think it is?” Raine asked his father, looking up at the older man.

It was a hot day. A bright day. The Sun’s rays fell mercilessly on the beach, baking the sand and turning the normally relaxing, muted blue water of the bay into a sparkling mass that rose and fell like the deep breaths of some massive creature, waves tumbling slowly towards the shoreline as it exhaled deeply. The steady sound of waves coming and going echoed this sense of the bay/creature’s deep, rhythmic breathing.

It was at the intersection where the waves met the sand that Raine and his father, Asher, stood. Where the water rushed forward and slipped between the toes of their bare feet, then receded as if feeling their presence frightened it—only to return again and again in the ceaseless curiosity of a dumb animal. The two stood a few feet apart, Raine and his knotted mop of dirty blonde hair to his father’s left. Further to their left, two men struggled to get a canoe in the water while a third waded in the bay a few feet out, waiting to hold the boat steady once it was afloat. Behind the father and son, two boys roughly Raine’s age chased each other across the beach, kicking up sand behind them. Farther back still, where the beach began to fade and rise gently into grassy hillside, three older townsfolk sat on the hill’s slope, hiding from the heat and Sun, one under a parasol, the other two soaking in a periodic breeze that carried with it the heavy salty scent intermingled with seaweed so distinctive to beaches. By the look of their dapper attire, they must have been fresh out of church, which was only a short walking distance away.

Raine mostly stared at his feet, wriggling his toes in the wet sand, watching the stuck together clumps of sand grains squeeze out between his toes, then wash away when the next wave rushed over his feet. Occasionally, he looked up and stared at the dark round monolith lunging towards the heavens from the tip of a thin strip of land farther out in the bay. From where he stood, the tower was tiny. He closed his right eye as if holding a wink and raised his thumb in front of his left eye, blocking the tower out of existence. This made him smirk. But Raine was old enough to understand perspective, and knew that if he and his father were on the island, not the beach, the ancient tower would loom over them ominously.

After a while, Raine looked up at his father. The older man was looking towards the tower with a hard gaze, hands in his short pants’ pockets. Asher’s dirty blonde hair, the same shade as his son’s, was cut closer to his skull, and did not flutter in the wind like Raine’s whenever a breeze passed by. The silence crept between them at a slow pace, and just as impatience was about to get the better of Raine and cause him to repeat his question, his father spoke.

“Honestly? I don’t know. The Ancients, wherever they went, left behind an awful lot of their belongings. As if they packed up in a hurry. Though, I guess it’d be kind of hard to take something as big as that,” he motioned towards the tower with his chin. “But. We’ve found some pretty amazing things of theirs, so who knows.”

“Yes but what do you think it is?” Raine asked, a slight whine of insistence laced in his tone.

Asher smiled. He looked down at his son, who fell just of short Asher’s chest, and ruffled the boy’s tangle of hair. This caused Raine to squirm away in embarrassment while failing to suppress a grin he couldn’t help. It made Asher realize just how old Raine was getting. Time. In Asher’s experience, you could fix almost anything in this world, make right by just about any mistake if you try hard enough, but there were two things you couldn’t get back: time and life. Asher shuddered, trying to shake the grim thoughts from his mind, and focused instead on towering black obelisk turned gray by the haze of heat and distance.

“I’m no Restorian, Raine. If you want a good answer, you should go ask old man Khris back in town. He’s the resident expert on the Ancients and magitech and all their machines.” Asher looked down at his son and saw the boy about to protest, but quickly continued. “But, if I had to guess, I’d say it was a marker of some sort. Like. A lighthouse. You know how they say the Ancients used to have boats that sailed not only the skies, but also the heavens? Well, maybe that’s what this thing is. The Ancients’ version of a lighthouse, like the ones with lights we use.”

“What about that big dish on top?”

Asher chuckled. It was like the why? phase all over again, and just like then, Asher had none of the answers. He considered himself a simple man. He just laid down track for the trains, or worked with the Restorians when they discovered any pre-existing tracks that once belonged to the Ancients, and tried to do as best by his wife and son as he could. They were, after all, his world.

“I dunno. Maybe some of the Ancients were huge. I mean like, giants, and they ate their breakfast out of those things. They were their bowls.”

“Daaaaaad!”

Asher laughed. “C’mon, let’s get back home to your mother. You know how she hates to be without us for too long. When you get home you can go pester Professor Khris and see if he can’t give you a better answer than my silly ones.”

Raine took his father’s hand and the two started across the beach back towards town. Both wore smiles the whole way.

~Dedicated to my father, William J. Holzworth, for Father’s Day–6.19.11

Writing Prompt: Write a story about this picture (below). Whose scooter is this? Where is he? She? Who is that across the street? What happens next? What’s the story? Tell it in exactly 250 words.

Will Capra stood on the far side of the intersection, hands buried deep in his jean pockets. Hard rain tumbled down in globules, bouncing off his shoulders and splattering his neck and face, sending shivers rippling through him. The night air was already cold, laced with late autumnal chill, and the rain made it worse. Morgan stirred beside him. She was wrapped up tight in a thick wool coat, which insulated her from the cold. She stood motionless, her gaze fixed like Will’s on the scooter parked across the intersection, just up Fifty-eighth.

The scooter was a relic, a throwback—just the sort of thing that would appeal to Elliott. The hacker had a penchant for being contradictory. He had the fastest fingers on the eastern seaboard, with more accounts cracked than any other console jockey. Yet Elliott dressed and lived in opposition of modernity. The scooter was just his latest retro chic purchase.

At least it made Elliott easy to spot, Will thought.

Will shot Morgan a look from the corner of his eye, and on cue, she detached herself from the storefront she was leaning against. Together, they cut across the intersection towards Elliott’s scooter. Will yanked his hands out of his jean pockets and fished something out from inside his coat. Despite the steady hiss accompanying the curtain of rain, Morgan still faintly heard the click and snap of Will’s gun as he thumbed off the safety and checked his magazine.