MAN WALKS INTO A BAR - a story in 100 words

MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

“Evening, landlord! A pint of your best, please, and one for yourself. I hear there’s been a UFO sighting?”

“Saw it with my own eyes. It came out of nowhere, hovered just over my car, then whooshed off. Never been so scared in my life.”

“Where was this?”

“On the old quarry road.”

“Can you show me?”

“You won’t get me out there again.”

“Then I’ll find it myself. A photo like that will get me into the nationals.”

 Later.

Another man walks into the bar. “Anyone lost a camera? Just found it lying out by the old quarry road.”

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This is yet another story prompted by a photo taken by Ted Strutz and posted on Rochelle's site  https://rochellewisoff.com/  - thank you both. By following the links from Rochelle's blog you can read lots of other stories from the same prompt.

I'm off balance today. Getting up at 7am because the only slot my hairdresser had free was at 9am has thrown me - the stress we retirees go through!! 

On top of that, over the past week I have been writing new sections for my Work In Progress (WIP) revision, and rediscovering the thrill of having so many thoughts tumbling over each other that my fingers can't move fast enough to keep up.

 If you haven't yet read my first book, A Volcanic Race, now would be a good time, because the next one is on its way! The link to Amazon is on the top right of my page. Yes, up there!

FROTHY COFFEE - a 100 word story

This photo prompt - taken by Rich Voza and posted for Friday Fictioneers by https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/  - had me stumped for 24 hours - should I go with the plane or try to find a story in one of the other barely-discernable features?
My ideas bank was empty, until a poem I wrote thirty-odd years ago came to mind. This story is a prose version.

FROTHY COFFEE

In the coffee bars of my youth we used to put the world to rights.

In our virtual reality no-one went hungry, because fertile nations grew enough food for everyone. Racism was a thing of the past in a world where all skin was cafė-au-lait. Democracy worked, politicians were honest, population was steady and disease controlled. War was banished – there was never, we agreed, a valid reason to take another’s life.

Sitting over spaghetti and frothy coffee, I believed in all this passionately – until I became a mother. Now, if anyone harmed my child, he wouldn’t live to see another sunrise.

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And here is the original poem -

KILLING

In coffee bars

twenty years ago

we talked endlessly

about the morality

of killing –

There was never

we said

a good reason

to take another’s life.

But now,

if anyone touched my child

or did to him

any of the unspeakable things

people do to people

these days,

I would kill them myself

with these hands

only one killing

wouldn’t be enough.

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So there you have it - two for the price of one! Please leave a comment before visiting the other writers of flash fiction by following the link from Rochelle's blog.

DESAPARECIDO

 DESAPARECIDO

My heart always lurches when I see one of these posters. DISAPPEARED. It’s usually someone’s child, and I’m a mother and a grandmother. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But a couple of years ago a teenage girl went missing near us, and we witnessed every move as the tragedy was played out.

She phoned her parents to say she was on her way home from her boyfriend’s house. She never arrived. Her friends said she took the short cut. Her parents and neighbours searched and found one shoe. One. The next day a helicopter circled. The Army set up camp at the petrol station and spread out with dogs for kilometres around, questioned everyone. I collected a fistful of Desaparecido leaflets and posted them round our village.

A week later the Guardia arrested one of the neighbours. They found evidence in his car and persuaded him to talk. The man had wrapped the girl's body in plastic to disguise the smell and buried her under rocks. The dogs had walked right past her. That poor girl’s parents might never have known what happened to her.

And one small tragic detail emerged later. The kidnapper’s car had slowed down at a junction that night and a man heard her scream, “He’s going to kill me!” He called the Police but his Spanish wasn’t good enough to make himself understood.

We drive past that murder spot every week, and every week I remember.

                                    ***************** 

To lift the DISMAL mood I thought I’d talk about DRAINS next.

If you DINE in a Tenerife restaurant or DRINK in a bar, you will probably visit the loo, where you will find a waste bin into which to DUMP your toilet paper. DISGUSTING, you think, and flush yours away. Please DON’T. Our drains are not DESIGNED for paper.

DIGGING through rock is DIFFICULT so the drains aren't DEEP and their DIAMETER is comparatively small. Some even go overland, propped up on blocks or piles of rock, and they are getting old. The population has more than DOUBLED and the drains get blocked.

My DAUGHTER once worked in an office on the ground floor of a 17-storey building. When DIRTY water seeped through the ceiling they called in a plumber. He had a DREADFUL job, wedged between the false ceiling and the concrete one, sewage DRIPPING on him as he worked in the heat. Try telling a whole apartment block not to DRAIN the bath or flush the toilet while you clear the blockage!

And a village near us is enduring months of DISRUPTION while new drains are run out beyond the harbour. DREDGERS created temporary DYKES to hold back the sea - they are only partially successful and the work stops at high tide. DIVERS go down to bolt the sections together and the contractors have promised to restore the beach to its former state. DO I sound DUBIOUS? 

BARS & BANANAS

BARS. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re the places to meet people, unless you’re into BOWLS or BADMINTON or BELLY-DANCING or can afford to join the BRITISH GAMES CLUB or play golf.

There is one English bar in our small town and four Spanish, so choosing which one to visit depends on which TV programme you want to avoid. BRITAIN’S GOT TALENT (hmm!) or The X Factor send us to a Spanish bar. BARCELONA playing Madrid is a good night to drink English and then shut ourselves indoors with the cat, away from the shouts and groans and the BANGS of fireworks.

 El BUHO is an odd place, frequented by a group of BULGARIAN deaf and dumb people. They came over here to sell novelty lighters in the tourist bars, which can’t earn them much as they live ten to an apartment, but presumably is an improvement on their former lives. Their language is silent, but the flickering of hands is strangely disturbing - my instinct is to ask them to keep the noise down, but one can hardly do that!

Strangely, I don’t find Spanish nearly as distracting, and often leave the OH at home while I repair to a coffee-bar - preferably overlooking the sea - to write in peace.

BASURA. At strategic points throughout the town there are wheelie BINS for basura (rubbish) and recycling bins for paper, glass and plastic. They are emptied every day. It’s a good system, much better than having a set of bins for every home that are only emptied once a fortnight, yet there are still people who complain at having to walk those extra few yards, and dump their rubbish wherever they please. There's a B word for them, but it escapes me for the moment!

BANANAS. One of those words that is difficult to stop spelling! The first time I flew into Tenerife, I looked down from the plane window and wondered what the huge sand-coloured areas were. Now I know they are covered banana plantations, and we eat the produce every day. Each banana plant produces one enormous red flower, and the petals curl back to reveal rows of tiny bananas. These grow until eventually there is a bunch of bananas it takes a strong man to lift. I once heard a disgruntled Englishman complain that they were too small. At 50c a kilo, eat two!

BEFORE I sign off for today, thank you to all those who looked at my blog, and especially those kind people who commented.