Free Writes

For today’s Flash Fiction, I’ve decided to participate in Chuck Wendig’s Random Photo Story Challenge.

Here are the three photos I chose for my inspiration: (Links because all are copywritten):

• Piano Apple by zakonslike
• Untitled by Leonardo Amaro Rodrigues 
• Closed Wings by yukiharu

White

She had been told, as a rookie, that there was always one unsolved case that stuck with you, the case that you never forgot, that you were never able to forgive yourself for failing to solve. The older cops, the retired cops at the bar, they said that no matter how long you worked with that hanging over your head, in the end, that case will be the reason that you quit.

It rained the day she came across hers. The weather was almost like the murderer had planned it to be so, like the sky cooperated to make everything look even more muted and grey.

The apartment the victim had been found in was one of those colorless modern numbers, all black and white, metal and glass and hard lines. It was the sort of pristine apartment where you can’t imagine anyone with mud on their boots, a dog on the sofa, toddlers running around, or any of those dirty things that inevitably come with living. It was too sterile for that, for anyone to actually live in. There hadn’t even been any food in the refrigerator.

The crime scene was as sterile as the rest of the place. Not a fingerprint to be found. The victim was naked, of course, but whatever she’d worn to get to that place had disappeared, everything except a silver bracelet around one wrist. She was beautiful and as pristine as the apartment, not a mark on her and nothing to mar her perfect skin. She lay there, white against steel grey sheets, her dark hair spread over the pillow like she was sleeping. There was no blood, no body fluids at all, not on the sheets and not anywhere else. The only two splashes of color in the apartment were the red of her lips and a single granny-smith apple sitting on the piano keys.

She always wondered after that why the murderer would leave that one apple in an apartment with no other food. It hadn’t even been tasted. No fingerprints. No saliva. Just a perfect apple, green against the black and white.  It didn’t make sense why it would be there.

Poison had been the murder weapon. That, the victim’s dark hair, her fair skin, and the apple, well, it always made her think of a fairy tale. They never identified the girl, and they never found any scrap of evidence to point to a suspect. A week after she had been found, the body disappeared from the morgue. The case was filed away – cold from the start.

When the detective retired, that was the one that she couldn’t forget.

As an old woman, she thought she saw the girl once, on the street with a handsome young man on her arm, but when she turned to watch them they were gone. There was only a small bearded man sitting on the street rattling a can. Coins for the poor?

She dropped a few quarters in the can and went on her way.

© 2012 – Jennifer L. Davis

If you haven’t stopped over yet, Chuck’s doing a quite interesting project celebrating the release of his new novel, Blackbirds. It’s a tumblog called “This is How You Die” where folks are submitting stories and artwork detailing their own deaths.  If you haven’t yet, go and submit your death today!

Before I get on with my story for the day, I am participating in Script Frenzy again this year, and my username, just as with NaNoWriMo, is IntellectualBlather – go ahead and add me if you’re Frenzying too.  This year’s script is a satirical fantasy story, as told by a dwarf sidekick.  I’ll be turning tropes on their heads in this one.

I still feel rather uninformed about script writing, and it’s not something that comes naturally to me, so I appreciate the practice Script Frenzy gives me, even though I have yet to “win” it.

And now for today’s little drabble:

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A/N: Today’s Friday Flash is NSFW due to descriptions of nudity and sexual situations.  According to the Fiction Ratings System, it would be rated M. Therefore, I am hiding it behind a more tag. Read on if you wish.

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Image via Wikipedia

A:N: I’ve decided to start participating in #FridayFlash, a Flash Fiction community on Twitter.  Flash Fiction, of course, consists of a short, usually unedited, vignette written to exercise the creative muscles.

Alice woke up and turned over, blinking at the buzzing alarm clock. A few extra seconds were required for the source of the sound to register before she threw a hand over at it to silence it, her other hand gripping at the back of her neck. Bernie had stolen the pillow again. Alice absently scratched him behind the ears, earning herself one barely opened eye and a soft purr.

With a yawn, she stumbled into the kitchen and poured coffee into her travel mug, taking a gulp with the desperation of an addict as she stared out the window.

“Bugger,” she said, with no real force. The garbage collectors had left the bin on its side again, lid open, lying across the driveway.

Alice sighed and shook her head, then returned to her room to get dressed. Her hair was limp (Damn the humidity), her clothes didn’t fit (She knew she shouldn’t have had that slice of cheesecake), and Bernie had coughed up a hairball in her shoe.  Her car barely had enough gas to get to work, but somehow she made it, even if she was ten minutes late.

Ten minutes late or not, she was the first one to arrive at work. She frowned and settled down in front of her computer, booting up and immediately going to check her email and Facebook.

Thirty-six minutes later, no one else had come in. Alice only noticed the time when she happened to glance at the clock – she’d been deep into her attempt to beat her high score in Bejeweled.

Forehead wrinkling, Alice got up from her seat and took a turn around the room, checking cubicles and offices.  There was no one here.  Thinking about it, she noted that there had hardly been any traffic on the road that morning, and no crowd at the elevators in the lobby. Not one client had come in, though she knew that there were several on the schedule.

Alice picked up the phone and dialed her boss’s cell phone, something she usually avoided doing.  She waited through three verses of “Yellow Submarine” before the phone switched over to voicemail. She tried her friend, Janet, who usually sat at the cubicle beside hers. Nothing.

Walking over to the window, she looked down onto the street below. Normally, by now, it would be filled with people. There was no one there.  The only movement came from a dog nosing about a dumpster in an alley across the street.

Alice sat back down at her computer. She pinched herself once, then again. It hurt.  She tugged a strand of hair out of her head. That hurt too.  Her neck still ached. This wasn’t a dream.

Alice sighed and turned back to her computer, pulling Bejeweled back up.  She would beat her score, today. She knew it.

© 2011 – Jennifer L. Davis – All Rights Reserved.

Describe the burial of Helen of Troy with dreams of an erotic afterlife. A frightened girl prays to the gods, the people fill their mouths with good bread, and bombs can be heard in the distance.

The body lay in state in a satin lined coffin, the scent of formaldehyde and death clinging everywhere, in spite of the usual attempts to cover it. She was beautiful. You could barely see the bruising. It was simple to see how she could be responsible for the destruction of entire civilizations.

It would have been better, had she lived. Now she was a martyr, a martyr for two sides fighting each other to gain control over what was left. And there was nothing left but a shell, dressed in a somber navy dress with a small rosebud pinned to the lapel.

She would have wanted lilies.

The sole mourner, a young girl, shivered each time the loud boom of the rockets went off, but didn’t cease in her prayers. Everyone else was too busy fighting their wars, she, at least, would see to it that the woman who was the reason for them would be buried properly, with the right rituals and symbolism and dogma, as befit a goddess in human form. She crumbled a cracker in sacrifice. The looters had already destroyed or eaten all of the good food, there would soon be nothing left, and the fields were burned or salted….barren, now.

The girl knelt at the altar, and prayed, for herself as much as Helen, and with occasional wary glances at the ceiling each time a bomb burst, as if she’d somehow be able to see the rockets coming for her through the plaster and frame of the building.

Ever so often, she caught flashes, the woman in the casket writhing naked in a bed, the two most powerful men in the world on each side of her, and Helen teasing them, manipulating them, tugging on all of their jealousies, turning them against each other.

Who knew how many would die, as a result of this? How many innocents would fall victim to what was nothing more than a tryst? Helen, perhaps, locked as she is in perpetual love-making, while her body lies cold.

Would her spirit ever realize what she had done? The girl prayed that it would, but did not expect the gods to answer, the gods never did. Someone would win the war, one side or the other. They would gain control over her body, but they would have nothing else left. There was nothing there to be victorious over.

The girl stood, crossed herself, and moved over to the casket, closing it, even as she heard the rocket whistling on its final descent.

What happens in a war, she wondered as the timbers began to crack, when you destroy the very thing you are fighting for?