24/7, Divination 7

I am participating in Folded Word's writing month event, called "24/7," during August. Participants spend the first 24 days of the month writing short works, then spend the final week in revisions. The second part of this entry gives more details.

I'm not required to give a central theme to the entries, but I chose the theme "Divinations" and am using a pair of dice to generate prompts (values shown below). My prompt for August 7 is to write divination-themed micro-fiction that uses water.

Between the Oases of Sleep (98 words)

The boy stands in dusty traveling clothes, cradling his flask.

"Give." The trader takes the skin, sips from its copper lip. "Tastes clean. Your family's water?"

The boy shakes his head. "I read dreams for it."

A chortle. "Accurately?"

Well enough. But he doesn't answer.

The trader's tent is threadbare and his beard is wild, but the boy expected that. He'd seen that face before.

"What do you want for this?"

He points.

The trader guffaws. "Me?"

Water for dreams. Passage for passage.

Before the trader can open his mouth, the boy smiles. "I knew you'd say yes."


Mandala collage uses two photographs I took in Ocala, FL, just as rain began to fall.

Dice values:

Blue Die
1 (CE logo). Twitter poetry (140 characters or fewer)
2. Twitter fiction (140 characters or fewer)
3. short poetry (8 lines or fewer)
4. prose poems (under 100 words)
5. micro fiction (40-100 words)
6. flash fiction (101-500 words)

Purple Die
1 (CE logo). Birth
2. Water
3. Air
4. Earth
5. Fire
6. Death

My Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition, defines "divination" as 1. the attempt to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means; 2. augury; prophecy; 3. perception by intuition; instinctive foresight. One meaning of "occult" is "hidden." That gives me a broad range of interpretation.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too










Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.