CHAINS - a 90 word story

CHAINS

I was twelve when the trader threw my dead mother overboard and kept me for himself. 

He sold the beautiful babies I bore him, then took a younger girl to his bed and sold me to a rich businessman.

I cooked and cleaned for them, nursed their children, ate only their scraps. At night they locked me in the outhouse – on the back of that door I scratched every day of my years of slavery.

Until I was rescued I didn’t even know how to use a mobile phone.

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Thanks to Rochelle for hosting Friday Fictioneers on her blog  https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/ from whence you can follow the link to read other stories prompted by CEAyr's photograph.

MORECAMBE MOON - 100 word story

MORECAMBE MOON

“Jian – don’t go. The moon is too full and I sense danger.”

“Mother – I must work. We owe the bosses so much money.”

Jian looked at his sleeping wife – she and the baby were both feverish after the birth in the crowded lorry with his hand muffling Chyou’s cries, but they had no money for doctors.

Jian was picking on the cockle-bed hours later, thigh-deep in seawater and listening nervously for the whistle to call his team ashore.

It never sounded. The spring moon had pulled the tide too high too quickly, and the whistle-man was the first to drown.

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The moon affects all kinds of tides, in our bodies as well as in the oceans. This photo prompt brought back memories of a heart-breaking disaster in Morecambe Bay in 2004, in which 21 Chinese slaves drowned when the tide caught them unawares. Slavery is never totally eradicated, despite all the laws against it. Read all about it on Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Morecambe_Bay_cockling_disaster