This post is submitted to Friday Fictioneers.

The rules are simple. Write a COMPLETE STORY in 100 words or less with a beginning, middle and end.

PHOTO PROMPT @ A. Noni Mouse

“I beginning to hate these people,” said Helen. “I just about lost my temper at dinner. Are we so afraid of Erick that we can’t talk about current events without the fear of offending him? How long can we talk about ocean cruises?  Neighborhood gossip? I would like to talk about the necessity of wearing masks. Vote by mail? Racial equality? Black Lives Matter? The feeling that this nation is being divided by the very one who should be uniting us? Let’s not have another Civil War!”

“So that’s why you spent the final thirty minutes doing dishes?” said Tom.

This post is written for Friday Fictioneers.

PHOTO PROMPT © Na’ama Yehuda

They had been quarantined for so long they had ceased to remember it. It started out slow with the leader of their nation promising that it would magically go away once the warm season began. It didn’t. A night out on the town with a fine meal at a fancy restaurant was a distant memory. The mere fact of wearing a mask was now a polarizing political statement. Are you red or are you blue? The deaths began to rise at an alarming rate. The elderly clogged the emergency rooms. The young thought they were immune. They weren’t.

This post is submitted to Friday Fictioneers. 

Total word count 100.

I purchased the storage unit as a temporary place to put my belongings while I moved into my future wife’s house. What I liked most was that it had a lightbulb inside.

It took a week to move everything I had. For the following few weeks I visited for an hour or two just to be myself. My own little furnished room.

It was a little over two months after the wedding I began to spend more time there.

This evening I am reading todays New York Times. I turn the light out at 10 wondering how things could have been.

This post is written for Friday Fictioneers.

PHOTO PROMPT © Ronda Del Boccio

You wonder why you torture yourself with the annual Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the same every year. Send out a distribution list to fifty like minded individuals and prepare yourself for the onslaught of replies. Limit the number of attendees to the first twenty that respond (always leaving room for a few extra exceptions for your “special friends” that didn’t make the deadline). You know from experience that fifteen of those people will volunteer to bring their favorite dishes which in all honesty not everyone likes. You will spend the next two weeks in a continuing state of anxiety. For what?

This post is written for Friday Fictioneers.

PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz

You always told me you wanted to know your birth parents. There is no doubt that you have found them. The DNA test proved it.

Now for the first time in over fifty years you actually know what your family looks like.There’s your mother smiling from that photo. The mother that left you on a neighbors door step over 50 years ago. Those are pictures of the people in her life after she left you. She even started a new family on the west coast and actually named her first daughter after you.

And not a single picture of you.