Unlike last week, when our prompt animal was one I wasn’t familiar with, this week’s is one that I know: a proboscis monkey! I know that because it makes him look like one of my favorite entertainers…
Jimmy Durante wasn’t the best looking actor, nor the best singer, nor the funniest comedian, but people loved him. Because everything he did came from the heart. (You’ll have to watch this on YouTube. It’s worth it.)
He reminded all of us to “Make Someone Happy.”
Heaven knows, he made a lot of people happy. And that’s all I have to say.
The days may be getting warmer, but this anthology is sure to chill you to the bone.
Welcome to the tour for It Calls from the Sea, a collection of tales from the high seas by a fantastic group of authors! Read on for details, an exclusive excerpt!
It Calls From the Sea: An Anthology of Terror On the Deep Blue Sea
Publication Date: May 21st. 2021
Genre: Anthology/ Short Stories/ Horror/ Paranormal
Prepare to die. The sea awakens.
Within the Mariana Trench, a research vessel’s crew is threatened by a mysterious force. A father and daughter’s holiday by the ocean turns deadly as a sinister creature stalks them. A group of friends learn that some things should remain in the ocean. Filled with a sense of wonder, a young biologist discovers a new species of kelp, but with disastrous consequences.
It Calls From the Sea is an all-original anthology of twenty brutal tales of horror from the deep blue sea.
Eerie River brings you another round of insatiable horror. There is no end to the terrors we have in store and there is nowhere left to hide. Get comfy, this is going to be a wild ride.
It washed up at dawn, drawn in on the morning tide from around the curve of the bay; a fishing boat, small enough for a cabin and a crew of three, but of no make or name we recognized. It curved gently towards the beach, its path haphazard and aimless, engines silent and windows dark. By the time it hit the shingle and plowed to a juddering halt a small crowd of us had gathered on the dockside to watch.
There’s something about an empty boat–something dragged in off the tide like that, all slow and sedate–you get to feeling it after a certain time at sea, like a second sense. That’s why none of the old fishermen made a move when it finally came to rest; they already knew what we’d find. Perhaps it started with the snow.
Great, driving fistfuls were we got that month; merciless, relentless, day after day. A frigid wind howled it down off the clifftops, swamping the roads and transforming the surrounding hills into impenetrable, white monoliths. Nobody arrived in town, nobody left; that’s how things go around here come winter.
There’s a saying in these parts that it takes a special kind of madness to move here from out of town, and another kind to stay. The seas and the cold breed a particular type of person–it settles in the bones, then squeezes the lungs; sharp and cloying in every breath. This far north the cold is bitter. Or perhaps it started before that, and none of us noticed.
Some of us tried to sail that week, but only made it as far as the curve of the bay before we were forced to turn back. Battered by the gale and the driving snow, there was no thought of casting our nets. Cutting through the snow was like cutting through ice; nothing in either direction but tumbling flakes and shifting, black sea. We watched the snow fall, watched it settle on the water and sink, and out of it all we watched the boat arrive. Philip Abernathy was the first to climb abroad, shimmying up the side like a boy climbing a drainpipe. Twenty-three that May–newly promoted, the youngest Constable in a town of sturdy fishermen and grey-faced old men–possibly he felt it his duty to take charge, or at very least be the first to check. He was, after all, vastly on his own up here until the snows cleared and the mountain roads became accessible again.
He’d been our Constable for all of two months, and up until then had contended with nothing worse than the odd Drunk and Disorderly on a Saturday night. It was too cold, too dark, to expect any trouble worth hurrying for. He disappeared inside the captain’s cabin, calling nervously, then stumbled out a moment later and was violently sick over the side.
The old fishermen knew, and now we knew too: no ship so silent has ever been manned by the living. Once he’d been helped down, pale and trembling, Abernathy directed a few of us up to find the body. It was slumped across the wheel, he said, tilting back and forth with the rock of the ship, its boots dragging in a slow, steady rut across the floorboards. It might have been a man once, but that was an estimated guess. It no longer had a face, just a slumped, desiccated skeleton.
Its hands, Philip whispered, its hands were clasped so tightly to the wheel. So tightly he couldn’t pry them open. We found the rest of the crew below deck. There’s a reason so many fishing communities boast smokeries and salt houses; salted things keep. Salted things keep for a long time, and add to that the conditions of an arctic winter…
Chris Bannor“Euphoria”, Chris Hewitt “Reef Encounter” Christopher Bond “The Ocean Sings Softly”, Dan Le Fever “Xook” David Green “Into The Depths”, Georgia Cook “Dead Ships”, Holley Cornetto “Heaven’s Lake”, Julie Sevens “Shoney’s Revenge”, Lin Darrow “Cry of the Hunger Fish”, M.B.Vujacic “Jelly”, Mason Gallaway, “The Sea Reaches Up” McKenzie Richardson “The Hunter and the Prey”, R. L. Meza “Long Pork”, S.O. Green “The Shadow Over Innsmouth High”, Steve Neal “Hostile Territory”, T. M. Brown “Buoy 21415”, Tim Mendees “Fronds”, Trey Dowell “Abyssal Horror”, Watt Morgan “Please Leave”
*****For any participants that do NOT like restrictions, please feel free to participate in any way you would like. It is great to read the contributions!****
Set up a timer or sit near a clock so you can keep track of the six minutes you will be writing.
You can either use one of the prompts (photo or written) or you can free-write.
Get ready and write for 6 minutes, that is it! Can you write a complete story? Can you think of a new Sonnet? Can you write 400 words? 400? 500? There are no restrictions on what kind of writing you do, but you should try to be actively writing for six minutes.
After you are done writing, include your word count and then post back to this page #Simply6Minutes or include your link in the comments section. Pingbacks are enabled.
*Feel free to leave your work completely unedited. I believe it is good to see, especially for new writers, that even very seasoned writers don’t write a perfect first draft.*
Have fun, challenge yourself if you’d like, read and respond to others’ posts.
Martin looked up at her. “She keeps looking this way and smiling. What for? Is there something up there that she has for me?” Martin had no idea what that “something” could be, I mean he’d only been in this world a few months and had already been whisked away from his mom and dad, brothers and sisters. “Is she planning something up there?” Martin just sat, knowing that if he continued to look up at her she would continue to look down at him and smile, and that gave him a good feeling.
“Come here, Marty, you little cutie!” Martin already hated the nickname but what was he to do? He had to smile and act like it was okay. He had no one to ask if there was a way to stop this foolishness. I mean, just a little while ago he had been plain old Martin. “Maybe she will pick me up so I can see what she is doing up there.” Martin continued to sit, holding his composure and trying to hide the anxiousness he felt inside. “If she has something up there I like then Marty won’t be such a bad name to live with!”
Image credit: Clay Banks @ Unsplash The image shows an older man sitting on a bench by a park. There is a trolley bag behind him. He is playing a stringed instrument and has a collection bag by his feet.
Thanks to Cassa of Flicker of Thoughts and Spira of inSPIRAation I have learned what the instrument in the photo is. Called a Erhu, it makes a most beautiful sound:
Love or hate them, pet cafes have become popular places over the last decade or so. Much has been written and said about the various dog, cat, rabbit and owl cafes and one really should do their own research before visiting such places as there are plenty of dubious ones operating under poor and squalid conditions.
When I heard about a capybara cafe a couple of years ago my first thought was “What the hell is a capybara?!” as I’d never heard of them. After that I wondered if
Bees are great pollinators! Save the bees! I saw a kids science show about making a bees nest. SciShow Kids on youtube. Check it out, it’s a great craft for kids.
If you are into all things nature, you have heard that bees are endangered around the world. Whether this is due to climate change, the extensive use of pesticides or other reasons, that fact remains.
As usual, education is key to change and preservation.
The Bee Protectors project has been in the works for a while, and it has been finally brought to fruition solely off the funding of our owners.
The Bee Protectors project is run by a small, passionate, group of individuals who have a goal of helping the world to be a better place through spreading the message of the importance of bees on our environment.
Bee the change and check out this website for unique bee related clothing and even jewelry. Shipping is free for orders over $45.
My friends, family and garden clients will be seeing me supporting the bees in this sweatshirt soon! I…
When I saw this week’s picture, I thought “that little guy reminds me of someone.” And I figured out who it was…
I was demonstrating how I could roll my tongue like that
If I don’t keep my mustache trimmed, it starts ending up like that. Here it’s more or less trimmed, but it still curls up quite a bit. My beard is really curly, too, and tends to do whatever it wants to do.
Still, it beats shaving. I’ve had the mustache since I was 19, but the beard is relatively new, only about seven years old. My gravatar picture shows me on my 59th birthday, after I had been letting it grow six months. Just woke up one day and decided I didn’t want to shave anymore. And that was that…
Congratulations to author Kat Martin on the release of her latest novella, Come Midnight!
Come Midnight
Publication Date: June 1st, 2021 (Today 🎉)
Genre: Suspense/ Thriller
Length: 84 Pages
A routine flight turns into a suspenseful race through the remote jungles of Honduras
When strangers Breanna Winters and Derek Stiles met on a flight to Colombia, they never imagined they would need to rely on each other for survival. Taken hostage by a group of radical environmental vigilantes, Bree worries her secret identity has been discovered—and her fears are confirmed when she learns a ransom request has been sent to her father. Though she’s the daughter of a prominent tech mogul, Bree’s wealth can’t guarantee her safety, so former Navy fighter pilot Derek pretends to be her fiancé in order to accompany her on a dangerous jungle trek led by the radicals. With chemistry building between the pair, a romance isn’t hard to fake, though they can’t let their attraction distract them. If Bree and Derek ever want to see civilization again, they’ll have to work together and rely on their wits to escape their captors.
New York Times Bestselling author Kat Martin, a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, currently resides in Missoula, Montana with Western-author husband, L. J. Martin. More than seventeen million copies of Kat’s books are in print, and she has been published in twenty foreign countries. Fifteen of her recent novels have taken top-ten spots on the New York Times Bestseller List, and her novel, BEYOND REASON, was recently optioned for a feature film.
