Category: Photo Fiction

Fear of Tunnels

This post is written for Friday Fictioneers. The challenge: write a complete story, using the picture prompt below, in one hundred words or less. My story follow the picture below. Cheers!

kent
PHOTO PROMPT – © Kent Bonham

Waking up in the middle of the street in Strasbourg at three in the morning was not the type of vacation they had in mind. They had planned the rail trip for months. It wasn’t the Orient Express but it wasn’t like hopping a freight train in the U.S.

It was all part Gary’s rehabilitation. Poor guy was terribly afraid of dark enclosed spaces. This was their first practice run.

“Listen Gary, when a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”

Lane Departure System Fails

31 10 October 27th 2013

At a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California, Durant Motor Company introduced its first Bus Lane Departure System (BLDS) for use on city buses. The lane departure systems are aimed at warning bus drivers, especially drowsy ones, if their bus wanders out of their lane. A digital camera mounted on the windshield ahead of the rear-view mirror keeps a watch. The system not only causes the steering wheel to vibrate if it senses an unintentional lane departure, it will also steer the bus back into the right lane. A spokesman for Durant Motor Company showed a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous bus is doing and when they might want to take over.

Surveying the crash site where the bus was demolished, State Trooper Leon Stopper said, “They always wondered how hard the BLDS will fight if it misinterprets a driver’s intentional lane change. Looks like round one goes to the BLDS.”

Photo Fiction

photo fiction

The rain outside inspires my dark thoughts

Drifting away, drifting away from this lonely church

I’m sitting up here by myself

We both know I’m not alone

Something in this putrid air makes me feel so empty

Perhaps it’s the rain or the coffin below me

Soon you will join me

Until your journey I will bemoan

If you could move a little closer please

I could tell you more about this retched city

My heart still knows your mine

If they only knew, if they only knew how pretty

So here I am

I don’t want to be alone

But now I have to ask

Why you put that knife in my back

Ugliest Building Award

Carbuncle Cup Winner
Carbuncle Cup Nomination

The Carbuncle Cup is awarded each year to the “ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last twelve years.” Some comments on this structure include “a travesty in more ways than one – we shutter at its lumpen form and mourn the building demolished to make way for it.” One critic called it “oppressively bland and totally insensitive to the beautiful surrounding it.” The building was part of a multi-million pound bid to redevelop the town’s center district but is now apparently dubbed “the dumpster” by locals. According to Building Design, the centre “had so much potential before multiple revisions and cost cutting.”

The building has also been criticized for being “grossly: over-sized, for its failure to blend in with the Victorian design of neighboring buildings.”

I think we have a winner here folks!

Submitted in response to Alastair’s Photo Fiction.

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