Every week, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields (thank you, Rochelle!) hosts a flash fiction challenge, to write a complete story, based on a photoprompt, with a beginning, middle and end, in 100 words or less. Post it on your blog, and include the Photoprompt and Inlinkz on your page. Link your story URL. Then the fun starts as you read other peoples’ stories and comment on them!
PHOTO PROMPT (C) ROCHELLE WISOFF-FIELDS
A hole in the ground
‘Take cover! Take cover!’ yelled the young man as he rushed between the market-stalls.
Yasmeen sighed. Her stall had only a few basic goods, which she had to sell to feed her children.
‘Ali. Ali!’ she called. Her daughter, Layla tugged at her skirt and pointed. Ali was fifty metres away, playing football. Even as Yasmeen watched, her neighbour emerged, grabbed her own son and Ali, and dragged them into the comparative safety of her house.
Yasmeen scooped up Layla and ran indoors, terrified by the scream of the low flying jet.
One second later, its bomb obliterated the marketplace.
Autumn Leaves 
All cruelly changed in an instant
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Thank you for your kind comment, Neil. Far too many lives are changed like this.
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A window into how life is precious, but precarious, and sadly, the “new normal” in so many parts of the world, so much so that compassion, looking out for your neighbor or neighbor’s child as well as your own, becomes instinctive. So well-told, Penny.
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Thank you for your compassionate comment, Dora. When people are in great danger there is often an urge to look after each other, isn’t there?
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Not a happy place. It seems it is easier to make bombs than resolving peace.
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Thank you for your thoughtful comment, James. Your observation “It seems it is easier to make bombs than resolving peace,” seems sadly all-too-true.
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So sad… It should be a wondrous marvel to fly… Instead flying is often used for many evils.
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Thank you for your thought-provoking comment, Michael. Perhaps the greater the wonder of a human invention, the greater its potential to be abused?
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Well told, Penny, the tension, the terror all reads very real. As it is for far too many people.
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Thank you for your kind comment, Gabi. It must be awful to live like Yasmeen. I’m glad my story caught a little of her ordeal.
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Dear Penny,
How quickly to took us from tranquility to tragedy. Well done.
Shalom,
Rochelle
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You can just feel the terror. Very timely and dead on (excuse the turn of phrase) to world issues. Happy New Year!
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Sad in a way that this is the norm for some people but reassuring in the way they look out for each other.
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Oh dear, you can feel the mothers disheartened existence.
This is her normal now, sad reality though
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An alarming but well told story. 🙂
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war is hell. why can’t all nations get along? lasting peace seems to be recurring pipe dream.
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What a horror story! You captured the terror very well, Penny.
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You captured the terror in this piece so well ❤
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As my mom used to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” I just went to google to see where it came from and found this:
The story that is widely circulated is that the phrase was first spoken by the English evangelical preacher and martyr, John Bradford (circa 1510–1555). He is said to have uttered the variant of the expression – “There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford”, when seeing criminals being led to the scaffold. He didn’t enjoy that grace for long, however. He was burned at the stake in 1555, although, by all accounts he remained sanguine about his fate and is said to have suggested to a fellow victim that “We shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night”. link to it: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-but-for-the-grace-of-god.html
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