Wordless Wednesday: Ubiquitous People-Gazing

Although alive, this one was fortunately behind glass. (And now the incomparable Ed Yong on a komodo necropsy.)

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Microfiction Monday

Monster’d

 Image credit: Talented artist ??**

Never mind what Twain said about standing between the mirror of imagination and a text. Petralina had a houseful of looking-glasses, and, far from a Babel, they hissed aspersions with one shimmering tongue, half-lolling reality on a carpet of choked illusion. Olive complexion, ha! More like a festering, Frankensteinian*, puke-green cucumber. Rotted-through.

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Addenda:

*The monster, not Dr. Frankenstein. Meaning, created by Frankenstein.

**If this is your image, I’d love to give you, the artist, credit for it, rather than the online political rag where I found it and, I presume, where it was used without your permission. Or, alternatively, I can remove it. Please let me know.

As to my extracurricular reading, I’m continuing on the Twain trail these days. And I’ve re-discovered the “Science of Us” Web site—specifically this story about people who experience body dysmorphic disorder, which strikes home for this self-deprecating introvert—and it ignited a thought that then formed a microfiction story around the challenge.

This belated microfiction piece was written for the Grammar Ghoul Shapeshifting 13 #8 challenge, which is now in the voting phase. Definitely drift on over there and have a look-see and then a vote-see for those talented folks. Perhaps you can then catch the next go-’round of the GG challenges.

On the Road with the Wordsmiths

We are on holiday. Nonetheless, for your viewing and reading entertainment, here are a few phone snaps as we travel the states. I hope you all are enjoying whatever season you find yourselves in.

Not your garden-variety farmer, but a sharkey farmer.

On that #travel note, you might also like to check out Cee’s “Which Way?” photography challenge, which asks for your best photographs of paths, signs, ways, roads, walking trails, tunnels, railways, and so on. Totally unplanned, but I managed to get several pictures that fit the challenge (some not shown here). In addition to seeking your photos, Cee has some intriguing photos of her own this week, particularly a “shadow tree-person” that could easily be used to fuel a fiction-writing prompt.

And remember: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” (Mark Twain, from Innocents Abroad)