Flickr Story #3: Watch Your Step

I awoke with a start. Silence, bar the buzz of the neon outside my
window, can can girl legs enticing customers to the sleaze bar
downstairs and kicking a pink glow into my room every few seconds.

It was still there, I could see it, a warning on the back of my door.
Not a dream. The type of people who leave such threats have no qualms
breaking and entering. At least it was just a sign they left and not a
thug behind the door. At the rate I'd been making friends in this shit-
hole part of town I was likely to run out of kneecaps.

The door suddenly shook as a fist pounded on the other side. Great. If
only the sign wasn't stuck over my peephole I could get a glimpse of
whoever was interested in seeing me at this hour. I'm betting it
wasn't Katherine. I quickly grabbed my gun from under my pillow,
slipped on my jacket and dropped out the window to the fire escape
below. Maybe the sign was right: time to watch my step.

----

Again, Hadyn's is here.

Flickr Story #1

Here's the first story for our flickr stories project, although mine is more of an outline for a movie:

"Said used to be a loyal driver for the upper echelons of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. Nowadays he ekes out an existence doing dangerous taxi and transport jobs. He has been offered a lot of US dollars to wait at a particular location outside a prison in Mosul, in northern Iraq. The arranged time has passed so he is considering leaving when he hears the sound of gunfire from inside the walls of the prison he is parked outside. A man drops from the wall onto the top of his taxi, bleeding, yelling at Said to get into the taxi and get driving. They make their escape through the back streets of Mosul.

It turns out that the escapee is a Kurd leader and through their mutual hatred of each other and their religions hilarity ensues... or through a series of trials they get through together they gain a deeper understanding of each other as human beings and come to realise that the ingrained cultural hatred between Kurds and Shites (or Shi'a, or whatever. I'll do my research later) is, like, totally bogus, dude."

Either way -> Hollywood clichés abound -> mucho dolleros for film makers. So, who want to produce this sucker?

Read Hadyn's story.

Flickr Stories

A few friends and I, including Mike and Hadyn, have started a little creative writing exercise. Each week one of us picks a photo from flickr's 7-day "interesting" stream and we all write a short (1-2 paragraph) story inspired by the photo.

I'm going to post my attempts here but we may eventually have a shared blog where all of the stories will be collated. Enjoy.