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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Scoville State Pen @FlashFridayFic

Another Flash Friday entry for the week. Happened to be up when this posted and got an early idea in. The prompt included a kitchen and a prison guard.

Scoville State Pen

Clive gave Briggs the nod and the old man poured tie first gallon of milk down the drain. Clive left Briggs to his sole task for the day to inspect the rest of his kitchen teams’ work.

Jackson and Grant carefully set serving trays at each seat in the cafeteria. Wingnut followed, counting out four saltines for each tray.

For Clive, today was better than Thanksgiving. At some point, long before he starting serving his own life sentence, they started growing ghost peppers in the prison greenhouse. The warden at the time let the inmates make hot sauce from the incendiary chilies and once a year the guards challenged the inmates to a contest to enduring drop after drop of the condiment. 

The inmates, used to the hard conditions and harder diets, beat their guards year after year. It was a morale booster for the incarcerated men that didn’t have much else to look forward to outside of the structured life in prison.

Clive confirmed that Briggs was nearly done with getting rid of milk. Things would be different this year. He’d found a new way to concentrate the sauce and with his first grandson on the way thought this was the right time for a breakout.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Pocket Change @FlashFridayFic

Been editing and doing my day job so not much time for Flash Fiction until today. This weeks' prompt was a spy and a beggar with a 200 word limit.



Pocket Change

What he had been asked to do by his new employer was no longer spying. It was terrorism. Byron stood in the crowded market and rattled the change in his pocket. The metal-on-metal sounded muted in the lead-lined jacket and gloves.

The nearby beggar’s cup was an ideal starting point for his polonium-210 infused coins to enter the currency system. The capitalist machine would take over from there and the poisoned money would enter circulation across the country. The ensuing panic would unbalance the nation enough for his new employer to make their move.

Spying was deception as an art form. When he’d become disillusioned by his own country’s evolved tactics, the Kremlin sold him on a pure form of spy game. Now they were asking him to conduct this microscopic nuclear strike on soft targets in his own home.

Byron collapsed before he recognized he’d been shot in the throat. He looked up to see the beggar standing above him, pulling off his false beard with the hand that wasn’t holding the silenced pistol.

“Dammit Byron, why did you have to turn?”

Byron considered warning his once partner about the coins that had fallen from his pocket and into the gathering crowd, but he forgot which side he was on.