Her Soldier Is Home

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers28 Comments89 views

“Go away.”

She looked down the hallway, remembering the first time she’d seen it. She’d been pregnant with him then, so big she almost touched both walls.

Funny the house seemed so much smaller now. Maybe that’s how everything always was, different than you remembered it, smaller or dimmer or not as pleasant. She sighed.

“Are you sure you don’t want some pancakes?” she called through the door. “It’s no trouble.”

“I’m sleeping,” he said, voice muffled.

She sat in the kitchen. She’d been so eager for him to come home. This was almost worse than the worrying had been.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Guests of the Shah

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw9 Comments42 views

“You’re limping, Houshang.” Hamid smiles up from the chessboard. “Stubbed your toe again, I suppose?”

“A blister from my long walk around the city yesterday.”

I chuckle. We both know why I limp.

I am a lifelong communist. My boiled cynicism often serves as much to poison as shield me. Hamid is a Muslim cleric imprisoned for criticizing the Shah’s fawning toadyism toward the Great Satan, America.

We are both guests of the Shah, here in the infamous Moshtarek prison which lies beneath the heart of the world’s most beautiful city. Our friendship almost makes me believe in God. Almost.

I hand Hamid my cigarette ration. I’ve never smoked, but he is almost as passionate about tobacco as he is about finer doctrinal shadings in the Koran. He pours coffee over the sugar cubes crushed  in the bottom of our cups.

I do not know how to tell him I am being released tomorrow.

What Pegman Saw

 

Houshang Asadi was a Communist journalist thrown into the cold confines of Moshtarek prison in Iran in 1974 by the secret police of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. There, he found an unlikely friend in the tall, slender Muslim cleric who greeted him with a smile. The two friends found common ground in their passion for literature, shared jokes, spoke of where they came from, their families, and falling in love.

On days when Mr. Asadi felt broken, the cleric would invite him to take a walk in their cell to brighten his spirits.  

Mr. Asadi would never have believed the cleric would one day become president of the Islamic Republic and the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Mr. Asadi fully supported the 1979 revolution. When he was arrested again in 1982 and accused of being a spy for the Russians and the British, he was convinced that it was a mistake. The regime sentenced him to death.

In a plea for help, his wife wrote to Mr. Khamenei, who had risen to power as president after the Islamic revolution. 

Mr. Asadi’s death sentence was reduced to 15 years in prison, during which time he was brutally tortured.

Mr. Asadi said he would now ask his one-time friend a single question: “Do you remember what you said? You told me no more tears, but now you are torturing people, you are raping our women, you are killing our people.”

 

 

Plan B

Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers20 Comments64 views

He got out of the car and decided to leave his box of office belongings in the back seat until he told her.  He hadn’t discussed it with her. This hadn’t been planned. One day, maybe, but not yet.

Working for Dynacom had been a soul-sucking experience he had come to loathe more with every passing anniversary, but it had bought this house. The car too, and Jeremy’s braces and Kit’s college and on and on. But what had it cost him?

His sense of purpose. His joy. His humanity.

He tried to suppress his sudden foreboding.

Confidence is key.

 

Friday Fictioneers

 

Times Is Changing

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw13 Comments73 views

Malmsey stormed into the inn and flung down his bundle. “I’ll not stand for this!” he shouted. “A German? I’ll sooner die!”

“Calm yourself, mate,” said the keeper, drawing off a tankard and pushing across the bar. “We’ve heard.”

“Times is changing,” said Old Grumps from his corner table. “Rumor is the Queen herself is behind it.”

“It is more than a rumor,” said a man Malmsey had never seen before, a tall fellow with hair like raven’s wings and eyes to match. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Herr Hoechstetter, Royal Mining Engineer.” He produced a waxed linen envelope from his satchel. “Her Majesty’s charter grants me extensive powers to manage copper production.”

“Why you? Why not an Englishman?”

Hechstetter gave a watery smile. “I have twenty years of expertise. But have no fear. If you are willing, you can learn my methods.”

“Times is changing,” said Grumps.

 

What Pegman Saw

 

Note: In the 1500s, England desperately needed copper, for the brass making industry, for coinage to mix with silver and to make bronze for canons. Sheet copper was also used in battery works, workshops which turned the copper into a variety of utensils. Later it was used for ships hulls as a streamlining crude armor plate.

The expertise of the German miners was far more advanced than that of the English, both in the underground work of tunneling, pumping and hauling to retrieve the ore but, more importantly, in the art of separating and smelting the copper. In the 16th Century, the Germans led the world in mining technology.

To enable the miners to reach maximum efficiency, Elizabeth created the charter of the Mines Royal which was augmented in the year of 1564. Under the leadership of Daniel Hechstetter, a mining engineer from Augsberg, this charter gave them the right to prospect and survey for mineral veins anywhere in the country. Their privileged position did not go down well with the natives.

The Vacation is Ruined

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers24 Comments73 views

Mark’s checked off just two items on his list before Marci commences meltdown. As always, he pretends to sympathize while secretly resenting Meg. She takes after you, his sullen mantra.

Meg is busy running through her own list. They’d slept the night before with the lights on. They’d FedExed Marci’s special food box directly to the hotel. Marci had the Trader Joe’s Honey Grahams and chunky Jif sandwiches, the Happy Cow vanilla soy milk.

Marci screeches and wails, flailing arms and legs, spittle flying while her parents hover and other tourists look on, clucking and whispering and shaking their heads.

 

Friday Fictioneers

A Prince Enchanted

Fantasy, Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw10 Comments43 views

Prince Berkant had begun to behave strangely, his sister Beyza thought. Every day he would saddle one of the stallions and ride out before dawn, returning long after dark with a wild look in his eyes.

At first she believed it was the looming responsibility of one day ascending the throne, but when she tried to speak to him about this he would give her a dreamy, faraway smile and refuse to speak.

She determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. One night she prepared her mare and in the dark of the stable waited for him to set out. She followed him many fersahs to a green valley surrounded by escarpments.

Berkant dismounted his lathered horse and set it grazing. Face alight with eagerness, he trotted up to a cave in the cliff.

Shocked, she watched him carelessly peel off his clothes and drop them as he climbed.

 

What Pegman Saw

 

In an ancient Turkish legend that goes back to the time of Gilgamesh, the Shahmaran is a creature whose head is a beautiful woman and whose body is a snake. She lives in the land of the snakes under the earth and lures unsuspecting lovers into her cave of honey. 

The Crossing

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers27 Comments68 views

When Dwayne retired from Motorola we sold the house and spent a year driving the Caravan across the USA looking for the place we loved best. When we saw the ranch in Sasabe on the Sonoran border, we knew we’d found it. That was twenty years ago.

It was a year-round thing. They’d come through at night, parties of five or ten or twenty. Some men, but a lot of women and children. I got in the habit of setting out gallon jugs of water, packages of corn tortillas and cans of beans. Dwayne was furious when he found out.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Afoot on the Staked Plains

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw9 Comments51 views

The man cut a Comanche arrow out of the mule’s flank after the fight at the tanks, but the festering wound would not knit.

Crossing the rain-swollen Nueces, the mule died under him and dumped his possibles into the churning red water.

He’d felt the animal falter as he spurred it down the bank, so he wasn’t surprised and managed to leap from the saddle, snatch up his powder and shot from the tree while he pulled his Walker Colt from his waistband. He waded ashore holding them aloft like holy relics.

But the man was afoot and it wasn’t two days before the half-breed Quanah and his band ran him down.

He managed to kill four of them before the Colt misfired. By then it was over.

The man spoke enough Comanche to understand what they had mind.

There was no comfort in this knowledge.

 

What Pegman Saw

 

Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Quahada Comanche Indians,  was the son of Peta Nocona and the white captive Cynthia Ann Parker. Among the Comanche, Quanah became an accomplished horseman and gradually proved himself to be an able leader.

The Quehadas refused to attend the Medicine Lodge Treaty Council or move to a reservation as provided by the treaty, so they became fugitives on the Llano Estacado. Beyond the effective range of the military, they continued to hunt buffalo in the traditional way while raiding settlements. 

For seven years Parker’s Quahadas held the Texas plains virtually uncontested.

Distraction

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers25 Comments68 views

She should have known at the casting call, should have taken her son and walked out. Instead, she’d signed the contract. The lure of money was too powerful, and she’d been desperate.

A prank show, they said, like Candid Camera. Her son would be among other children at the museum, all in uniform. On cue they would begin screaming. The organizers wouldn’t say more.

When she studied the contract afterward, she found the rider about the chemical agent at the very bottom, in tiny print.

It was weeks before she knew the full scope of what she’d helped them do.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Breaking The Triangle

Fiction Prompts, Historical Fiction, What Pegman Saw8 Comments26 views

The East India Company Director sighed. He took off his glasses and set them on the dossier. “Is it really as bad as all that?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” said Briggs. “In fact, it’s actually worse. The Chinese are well aware of our vulnerability, especially regarding tea. The tonne price is increasing almost daily.”

“What of all the opium we supposedly don’t sell them?” asked the general. “Why not increase that price in turn? They need that worse than we need tea, I expect.”

The magistrate shook his head. “The Emperor has declared the trade illegal, punishable by death. He ordered the Macao warehouses burned.”

“I suppose this means war,” said the general. He almost sounded pleased.

“One other thing, sir,” said Briggs. “I have a report from Mr. Jameson, a botanist. He’s surveyed a valley in Kashmir and believes that it will support tea production. Our own supply.”

 

What Pegman Saw: Kanrga Valley

 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was tremendous demand in Europe for Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain pottery, but very little demand in China for Europe’s manufactured goods and other trade items. Consequently, Europeans had to pay for Chinese products with gold or silver.

The British struck upon an ingenious way to reduce a huge trade deficit. Their merchants bribed Chinese officials to allow entry of chests of opium from British-ruled India, though its importation had long been banned by imperial decree.

The production of tea in India by British concerns in Darjeeling and Kangra did much to alleviate this deficit since tea was the one thing that was impossible to find outside of China.