Every #harvest was hard work for the farmer. When the harvest was bountiful, she worked in the field every day. When the harvest was small, she trolled the highways for field fertilizer, looking for hitchhikers and vagrants and stalled cars.

Inspiration: harvest vss365
Potential: high
Notes: This is basically a complete microfiction. Could be amped up, rewritten a little, more show less tell. And seasonal!

I have always loved you. In six of the time-streams I kill you--twice because you cheated on me, once because you were dying of cancer, twice because you were leaving me because I cheated on you, and once because I was insane. In eight time-streams we married, but we always divorced. Twice, after fifteen years of marriage. Sometimes we have children, but that doesn't correlate to any of our love problems. Once, the children died, and you killed yourself. In one time-stream, I never worked up the courage to even talk to you, and you never realized you were being stalked by a mad scientist. You had a good life, but I died young. I wonder, sometimes, if that's the time stream I should work to make immanent, but the thought of never seeing your eyes light up when you see me is intolerable.


Inspiration: "Lovesong" - Snake River Conspiracy
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh. It could be a decent flash story, but it doesn't really pull me in.

From a scrap of paper buried in a box of misc paperwork:
"The carcasses of their ships will make fine reefs"
(Should they be aliens whose young need reefs?)

I actually remember this idea. I think.

They tangoed across the room with a dust rag in one hand and a mop in the other, pausing in the middle for a close embrace, and then moving on with the perfectly timed rhythms of professional dancers. They were professional dancers, of course, but not first and foremost. Nor were they cleaners first. No, what they had chosen to set above all other things in life was being able to live in space. Chronic lower back disc pain would have rendered her unable to dance...eventually, barely able to walk. In space, though there was some gravity in the residential quarters, she would get no worse. And she could still dance. And so they took whatever jobs they could--for he was a man loyal to the woman who had been his partner in dance since they were seventeen and his partner in romance for almost as long--and they danced in space.

Inspiration: "Swedish Wedding March"
Story Potential: Low? High? I am confused by this.
Notes: I love this image, but it's not a good story idea.

"Tech support." "Yes, I'm having a problem--I can connect to the internet." "You can't connect to the internet?" "No, you don't understand--I can connect to the internet." "I'm sorry, I don't see what the problem is." "I don't have a computer." "I'm sorry, we only support computers. If you're accessing the internet through your smartphone or the TV link, you'll need to contact--." "You *don't* *understand*. I'm not connecting through the computer, or the phone, or the TV, or any bloody other thing!" "There's no need to shout, sir. I'm sorry--" "I'm connecting to the internet through my *brain*!" "What?"

Inspiration: I'll give you one guess.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: This is entertaining, but there's no actual story here.

She was in the park when she noticed the close attention the birds were paying to the man by the fountain. It was odd--she'd walked past the fountain a million times before, and always it seemed that there were people hovering about and looking. This was the first time she'd seen a man sitting by the edge of the fountain and leaning far, far out over it, to the base of the statue itself. It was strange, she reflected, that children never played in the fountain. People never threw quarters in for good luck, bums never tried to scrounge around for change in the fountain. Nobody ever sat on the edge of the fountain, either. It was always, instead, that they stared at it, or commented on it as they walked past. She was not one of the starers. She sped up whenever she walked past, because she did not like the way the strange, blocky shape seemed to loom,. It was a cold thing, a thing not of the park. Come to think of it, it was the first time she'd seen birds anywhere near it. Or squirrels. Or rabbits. Or any of the rest of the park's semi-urban wildlife.

Inspiration: "An Exultation of Larks," by James Lipton
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Who has two thumbs and a good idea? This girl!

"Do you think they'll guess?" Nayla whispered, leaning closer to her sib-sister and running her long nails along the side of her face. "Never," answered Laya. "We are too clever for them, dearest not-sister." Layla chuckled throatily. "Most dear of not-sisters!" Nayla sighed and leaned against Laya, feeling the vibration of the spaceship through the body of her love. "They'll say we're too young," she lamented. "When have elders ever said anything else?" Laya answered. She bent her head and slid her lips across the full, yielding mouth of the girl--


Inspiration: wilowisp answering my cloudscudding poll by saying that I should post less about Barely Legal Lesbian Space Vampires.
Story Potential: Low. Dear lord, this is so awful.
Notes: The kicker, of course, is that they're not actually talking about their, err, sensual relationship...they're talking about about that guy they just killed by draining his blood.

The black-eyed Susan was drying around the edges, looking as if it had just begun to wilt but still had some vigor to it. It looked exactly as it had twenty years ago, when she'd had it encased in a stasis field. The other flowers from the bouquet were long since dust, but that one survived. She kept it in a case hanging on the wall above her desk, as a perpetual reminder that sometimes, being half-dried dead wasn't a sign that things were just aging naturally. Sometimes, it meant that there was a conspiracy afoot. No decay should be attributed to nature. No death should be unsuspected. And one should never, ever ignore a bouquet of flowers that had been tossed casually in the trash in the middle of an event, even if they were slightly wilted around the edges.

Inspiration: What else? A black-eyed Susan, wilting in its vase.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: This has meat to it, in and of itself, but it doesn't really speak to a larger story. Still, I really like this little vignette.

Sudden death came not from above, where they had been watching carefully, but from beneath them. The cisterns that they'd been filling with rainwater went black overnight. Nobody noticed until the next morning, when the first girl to pull up a bucket of water, sleep still in her eyes, screamed and dropped her bucket to clatter against the cobblestones. Her scream convinced her that she was not still dreaming, as did the pain in her foot where she'd dropped the bucket. She ran to the head of the council and told him frantically that the water had gone bad. It took her half an hour to convince his advisors to let him see her, and another fifteen to absolutely convince him that she wasn't remembering a dream. It was only once she took her shoe off to show the bruise--

Inspiration: "Back From the Dead" - Napalm Death
Story Potential: Medium-high.
Notes: Eh. Would be a good flash fiction piece, though, I think. Just a bit of polishing and a bit of extra stuff. So yeah, the water has reverted to normal, others have taken it, and they're all rushing around to get them to stop drinking the water while people are and are being infected with whatever's going to kill them.

It itched and wiggled behind his eye, until he couldn't help picking up the pen from his desk and really working it around back behind his eyeball. It felt heavenly, just like the commercials had always promised it would. He heard a gasp and saw Sandra standing in the door to his cubicle. Papers fell from her hands as she stared at him. "Don't worry, Sandra," he assured her, "it's ok. Really. I got one of those mail-order eyes from the TV advertisement." He chuckled. "Can't believe I thought that they were scams for so long. They were right. Goodbye forever, dry eyes!" Sandra pointed and tried to say something, gagging, but only strange grunting noises came out. She turned and vomited over the cubicle wall. "What the fuck!" he heard. He couldn't help chuckling. All this fuss over a little mail-order eye.

Inspiration: Dry eyes.
Story Potential: Um. Medium. Maybe high potential to rework as-is into flash fiction. The problem is that this reeks of the amateur "and then I went cccrrrazzzzyyy!" BS that tries to pass itself off as horror fiction and fails.
Notes: I do like this little scenario, though it does feel amateurish as hell.