Rejuvenate & Potpourri
100 Words a Day: 1 and 2
Inspired by Erica Drayton's 100 Word Stories series, I'm attempting to use the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day to write 100 words of fiction a day. Today is a double-header, featuring Jan 1st and Jan 2nd's words, rejuvenate and potpourri, respectively. These will all be around 100 words, never under 100 or over 200.
I'm typing these from my phone, so excuse any failures in formatting and tagging etc.
Rejuvenate
“I guess time just makes fools of us all…” Father John Misty drones over the speaker system; Ryan takes a long sip of his beer. A dark, rich stout. It's good. He hadn't expected a Berkley Springs brewery to be so good. He didn't expect to be in rural West Virginia at all, but that's where the case had led.
Months in to the new role with the FBI’s Abberant Crime division felt like years, but he was getting close.
The Springs, allegedly visited by Washington, were rumored to be rejuvenating. The hollers around town were more interesting.
DNA evidence had recently come back and indicated many of the organs being sold on the black market and found at ritual sites came from this area. Someone here was up to something…
Potpourri
Dried leaves crunched beneath Adeline's feet. She had been walking on this trail for a few hours searching for Gentner's Fritillary. It was endangered last time anyone had updated that list.
‘So what?’ she thought. The nodding, red-yellow flowers were perfect for her dried catalog. It was a lily and lilies were poisonous. She needed to sample it. She had tried them all: foxglove, oleander, nightshade, hemlock, belladonna to no effect.
She even tried fentanyl 50 years ago. She could only figure some rare mutation kept her living. Bullets hadn't worked either, she tried that last decade when population hit one million.
A wracking desire to end the despair is what kept her going; she needed to find the bliss of death.
She rounded a bend in the trail and was feet from a roaring grizzly.
‘Not this shit again…’ she thought.