Plot Medics 

Goodnight Moon (100 words, including title)

The path across the sea gleams gold, then red. Next should be silver – but the silver path never appears.
The sea once licked the cliffs twice a day; her magic rose with it.  There were pools, where limpets with their delicate striated shells clung, where anemones tossed tendrilled hair, and shrunk with the retreating tide to fat shiny jewels.  There, at low tide, magic hid.

Now the pools have dried, and she with them.  Once she danced the moon’s path; now she is a husk, an empty shell washed up on the shoreline; now, there is no moon.

Here's another one from the Scottish writing retreat. Each member of the group wrote a few song titles on separate pieces of folded paper. We each picked one and then had 20 minutes to write a story of exactly 100 words, including the title.

Sunshine Underground (100 words, including title)

It has taken generations. Tunnelling up to the surface cost a tenth of our number; crushed by falling rock, snatched by beasts that slide in the dark, sickened by the Grey Wasting if they stayed too long at the top. The expedition beyond the far caverns to fetch the crystal spent more lives, and we polished away days and months.

Finally all of the lenses and mirrors are in place. We wait for the sun to rise,  for the touch of our god to reach us in exile. As we wait, we draw lots for the first sacrifice.

This came out of a writing exercise while the Plot Medics were away enjoying themselves in the wilds of Scotland (thus the late posting of this week's flash - we were Beyond Broadband).  The exercise involved taking three pictures at random from a stock of images and writing for 20 minutes, including all three images in the story.   I got a woman in a red dress, a young man perched on a framework seeking something in the distance, and...well, you'll see.

A Storm is Coming (996 words)

“I keep expecting someone to shout, “Unmask, Unmask!”  The woman in the red dress complained.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  Her companion, a chunky, middle aged man, danced quite well, but the woman in red, whose name was Gwynneth, was beginning to realise he was a bore, at least by her rather exacting standards.  She didn’t want to be stuck with him all night.  “Edgar Allen Poe?  The Mask ofthe Red Death?”  He looked blank. 

"Is that something else we're supposed to be worried about?"  He said.  "The Red Death?  I thought what with all this.." he waved at the shuttered windows, "we had enough problems."

"Never mind," Gwynneth said.  "But you never know, do you?  Everyone's been talking about climate change for years, but I don't think anyone expected this, either."

"I certainly didn't," he said, his tone indicating that his very lack of expectation should have prevented any of this from happening, if the world were properly organised.

Gwynneth excused herself to go find a drink.   

The bar staff had obviously decided to go for broke – they’d just loaded a table with everything in the cellar and scarpered, God knew where to; it wouldn’t be outside, at any rate. 

Gwynneth poured herself  a generous glass of a fairly decent merlot that the scavenging hordes had missed, and looked around for anyone interesting.  She had no idea how long she was goingto be stuck here, and with the television reception erratic  verging on nonexistent, and consisting mostly of weather reports, there was no point sitting in her room.  

She couldn’t see anyone she fancied talking to.  It was just her luck, she thought, to be caught at a hotel largely given over to a conference of timeshare salespeople. Several  had already tried to interest her in property in Greenland.  

The only other people seemed to be a stag-night, one of whose guests had tried to grope her but had been so drunk he had missed, and a small, morose group of car-salesmen, who were huddled in a corner drinking away the last of their wages and hoping to avoid being spotted by any of the other trapped guests.  She only knew they were car-salesmen because she had seen them arriving with another man, who in a moment of drunken fury, had jumped onto a table, told everyone what he did, and started ranting that it wasn’t his fault and why did everyone blame him, he was just trying to make a living?

The remaining hotel staff – there were still a few around at that point – had bundled him out, but she was pretty certain at least one of them had put the boot in, and she hadn’t seen the man since.  

Gwynneth wandered out of the badly decorated and rather chilly ballroom and down a side corridor, pushed open an anonymous white-painted door and found a set of worn-carpeted stairs.  For lack of anything better to do, she went up them.

The patchy paint and dull colours seemed to suggest that these were staff quarters.  Further along, she could hear a much livelier party than the one downstairs. 

No harm in trying, she thought.  She still had the rest of the merlot, it might act as a party-passport.  She glanced at a window as she passed; the flat middle-of-nowhere landscape was already darkening under its fuzzy orange haze of pollution.

The room was crammed with people in the hotel’s blue and lavender uniforms, and several in the white of porters, cleaning staff and cooks.   In the middle of the room, an iron staircase led up to a roof opening.  Several people were clustered around it, looking up.  

It was still open.  Gwynneth raised her eyebrows, and pushed her way through the crowd.  Despite the fact that it was obvious from her dress, no-one seemed to notice or care that she was a guest.

She drained her glass, paused for a moment, then shoved the corked bottle in her bag and climbed the narrow stairs onto the roof.  The sky looked ill and bruised.  Against it, she could see some kind of iron framework where a young man was perched, peering south.  People were yelling at him to come down.


“We’re shutting the hatch if you don’t,” someone shouted. 


“Just a minute,” he yelled back.  “I want to see if I can spot them.”

But the wind must have changed.  The first toad caught him on the back of the neck.  The few people still on the roof screamed and scrambled down the stairs as he flailed and lost his balance, tipped forward, and held on with one hand, legs kicking.  He just managed to catch a foothold when the rest of the stormfront came in, and toads began to pelt from the sky, splatting against the roof.

People were screaming to shut the hatch, shut the hatch.  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Gwynneth said.  She pushed through the yelling, arguing mass and ran up to the top step, and held out her arms.  “Jump!  I’ll catch you!”  He looked at her panic-stricken and his foot slid from the railing.  She tried to catch his flailing legs but they were too high up.  “Come on!”

He dropped, right onto her, knocking her back down the steps into the room below.  A dozen people slammed the roof hatch shut, while more stamped on the few toads that had fallen through.  The noise of them hitting the roof was like wet thunder.

Gwynneth, winded, dragged herself out from under the young man.  A toad had landed in her cleavage.  She picked it out, and looked at it.  It looked back with bright, gold eyes.  All around people were screaming and killing them.  “Poor thing,” she said to the toad.  “It’s not your fault, is it?” 

She got up, took the wine out of her handbag, left it on a table, and carefully put the toad in instead.  Then she left the party, shutting the door behind her.

This one came from staring out a train window, listening to "Supermassive Black Hole" by Muse, and "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" by the Scissor Sisters. I had to trim like mad to get it into 1000 words.

Demon Driven (998 words)

It’s carnival time in Dindrisk, has been for three days, will be for another ten. They know how to party here. I barge my way through a drunken crowd, a blur of masks, feathers and spangles, to the spaceliner’s dock. A young man fidgeting in an engineer’s uniform meets me at the top of the gangplank.

“Astromancer Pierce?”

“That’s me.”

He’s probably expecting a corset, a lot of eyeliner and black leather. I did all that. Now I’m older and a little bit wider, and I stick to comfortable and easy to clean.

“I’m Bradford,” he says. “The Portal Engineer.” We jog along a plush corridor, all oval  windows and gold swirly bits, strung with carnival feathers and shiny beads.

“We picked up a new artist here two days ago,” he says. “The last one went, well, you know how they do, and we had to drop him off for, uh, a quiet rest. We can’t get another one until the carnival finishes, we’re supposed to take off tomorrow and it won’t work and...” Bradford swallows.

“You’ve got a Muse, right? With a sculpture kink?” I ask.

“Yes, but it doesn’t like the new artist.” He hustles me through a door into a more utilitarian space; industrial grey, tracked with cabling ducts.  “It ignores him, and it’s moving around. A lot.”

I can hear what he’s screaming in his head. “What if it gets out?”
 
“Muses are tricky,” I say. “Not big on ripping out guts, but they’re the definition of changeable.”

Bradford cranks open another hatch and we’re in the portal drive  room. Sage burns in the censers, the silver circle set into the floor is filled with the blue shimmer of magic, and with demon.

“The binding looks solid,” I say.

The place is littered with discarded beads and champagne corks. A skinny, clay-smeared bloke circles around a huge lump of a work, darting in to pinch on another piece.
 
The demon spins, stamps, points a talon at me. “I smell magic on you,” it says. It grins a zig-zag half-moon. “And Incubus. Ha!”

Talons are bad. A happy Muse usually takes human form, and is all big eyes and improbable breasts or chiselled cheekbones, whatever works. Unhappy demons won't bend space to move your ship. 

“Greetings to you too,” I say in its language. “Don’t you like what they’re feeding you?”

“So stale. I feed. I hunger.” The demon rocks rhythmically, waving its skinny arms.

“What is it you want?” I ask, not expecting much. Demon and human concepts don’t relate too well. Everything is energy to them.

“I crave. New flavour in the air, and then gone. I starve.”

“Uh huh.” I wander over to the sculptor. The work looks familiar, and when he looks me in the eye my instincts scream “fake”. But there are formalities to observe.

“Tell me about this piece,” I say. It takes a moment for the bullshit to kick in, and it’s all the wrong kind. He spiels about light and angles and sublimity. He doesn’t talk about how he saw it in his head, and what the work demanded. And his aura stinks.

“This guy’s a forger,” I tell Bradford.  “He’s just recycling somebody else’s work, even with the Muse there, so his energy is stale. You got any sculptors on the passenger list? One or two pieces should get you to Bratngash. You can hire a new artist there.”

“Do you think they’d want to do it?”

“For inspiration from a Muse? They’ll bite your hand off.”

#

The enthusiastic volunteer has hair dyed green and chews gum non-stop. She works with wire and  discarded carnival feathers and beads. I can see her ride that rollercoaster of  doubt and exaltation as the extraordinary piece takes shape. The Muse stamps and claps its hands as the sculptor pirouettes around her work. And it complains.

“Stale. So cruel to give delicousness and take it away. I starve. Give it back to me.”

“Give you back what?”

“This,” the demon stamps and waves its hands again. “What was here before.”

“What does it want?” asks Bradford. His eyes are red, and ringed with dark circles.

“I don’t think it knows. But I want a drink. And you need one.”

“I’m on duty.”

#

The bar is crowded. Drink is drunk, quite a lot of it. Bradford leans forward, leers, wobbles, rights himself and shouts over the music, “I heard your first job was with an Incubus.”

I look out over the dancefloor, where couples are doing their best to shag standing up and fully clothed, and I smile. My Incubus had been a – well - a demon on the dancefloor; all that eye contact, bodies almost touching, the pounding beat. He needed sex, but he loved to dance, and he taught me a thing or two.

“When exactly did your Muse start acting up?” I ask.

“First night of the carnival.”

A day before the forger came on board. “And you were partying in the portal room?”

“Look, I was off duty,” he says. “And all these passengers wanted to see the demon.”

“They danced around it, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So your Muse has changed its kink. It’s come over all terpsichorean.”

#

The demon perks up as soon as the bass beat kicks in. I clap my hands and twirl and suddenly there’s a man with angular cheekbones and snake hips in the circle. I undo the binding with a flick of my wrist, ignoring Bradford’s screams. Demons work better when they’re willing.

People use sex to describe the feeling of sharing with a demon, because it’s the closest common experience. But it’s a eureka moment, the flow, the surrender to spontaneous art. Your head and heart are wide open, you are relaxed and powerful and everything is just fine.

The demon might have to go back in its cage at Bratngash. But right now we’re dancing, and I could stand to lose a few pounds.