Theme:: Schnapps

Me mam used to say you can tell a girl’s character by her choice of tipple. Herself she had been an honest-as-salt Dublin gal, preferring her whiskey warm as she liked her men.

Before the war was another epoch.

Since then I have seen many an impeccable lady who sip their wine with tasteful discern; beer-guzzling nurses with their hands as coarse as men’s; pale alley girls with waists narrow like their tinkling glasses of gin.

And now, in a foreign city, I sit under the dooming gaze of your eyes as you slowly spill over ice your cherry schnapps as bitter a red as the blood on my hands.

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110 words.

Theme:: Fell

You have to click and enlarge the image, because there's a drabble alongside without which it won't make much sense. (I went for 150 words this time and exceeded the limit by exactly five words, so what you have here is 155 words.)

MS Word (for story), pencil, watercolour, Photoshop. Background image of 12th century Andalusian Quran stolen off Wikipedia. Clothes, drawing style and other details studied from many many Islamic manuscript illuminations but not directly copied off any, so should I mention particular reference?

Also, ten points to anyone who can find out the context of the story. :D

Theme:: Clear

The morning glittered. Below at the square a solitary man was sweeping the red-yellow leaves with a long wiry broom. In the houses the men and children were awakening and ambling downstairs for breakfast; soon they will be dressed and released in the streets like an outbreak of plague into the sharp autumn air. Oh humanity, how you never tire of yourself!

He sat solemnly on one of the rooftops around the square. He was a fifteen-year-old boy in shirtsleeves and breeches, with a mop of chestnut hair and a button nose.

Not yet, but soon, he would require a name.

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• A "drabble" is a 100-word story, a form usually used for fan fiction.
• I'm thinking of writing a drabble for each of the prompts henceforth. If all goes well (i.e. if my imagination doesn't fail), they'll all be about the same person, a character I'd created and written a lot about and then given up a couple of years ago.
• Sometimes I'm going to add a bit of a sketch to the drabble, not always, because I'm a slow and not-very-skilled artist. Let's see! :D

This is just a decoy.

While it wasn't the easiest to make Ashvin dig onions in the patch of green adjacent to the school building, under the circumstances he decided that the chore would puncture his ego with slightly less severity than an objection was threatening to. The classic routine of lavatory-cleaning failed to suit his tastes. It was not quite unknown to Ashvin that all that stood between him and that last straw was a long-distance phone call from his father to the principal. That detail failed to cheer him up. This austere school building, with its hollow corridors, nightly shadows creeping across dorm ceilings, the repressed, soulless boys, the pasty-faced brothers, the maudlin pastor, angels, saints, choir practices, prayers at ungodly hours, above all Jesus fucking Christ... the entire freakshow disgusted the hell out of his thirteen-year-old self.

And as if perching on the rear wall during recess and making a detailed yet appreciative study of the chicks from the sister school next door was even a bad thing!

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Yes, yes, I know... don't kill me. I've been running very low on both time and imagination, but uhm... Such Base (and Humourless) Trickery Shall Not Be Repeated, yes?