economy

JusJoJan26 Day11: Opinion

/ Liz H-H / Leave a comment

January 11 – “OPINION”. Many Thanks to John for today’s prompt, as we take a moment or two each day this month to reflect on words that come from the community. And thanks to Linda G Hill for getting us organized!

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Favorite restaurant, family owned, the best place to be if you want home-cookin’ not your own. Reliable quality, too: good soups and bread, burger and fries, miracles with eggs, real pan-fried fish that doesn’t come frozen from an oversized plastic bag stuffed with suspiciously uniformly shaped and sized, already-breaded hunks of fish flesh. Cocktails creatively concocted, local brewery beer on tap, rich, heavy coffee, served up black or tarted up with cream and syrup, or a shot of whisky.

The real deal.

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Cider Press

/ Liz H-H / 19 Comments
One bad apple can tip a balanced local economy in this whimsical 248-word story. Another Unicorn Challenge
© Ayr/Gray

Many thanks to Jenne Gray and C.E. Ayr for their photo prompt, THE UNICORN CHALLENGE.  (05/23/2025). No more than 250 words in length.

Me and my cargo have been waiting by the side of this road, near all day. The sun’s hot, ground’s dry, trees hard with the lack of rain, and Trevor never did show up this morning to drag us the rest of the way to the rail station, just a quarter of a mile away. The first and last train will have come and gone by now, I reckon.

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Gothic Survival Skills

/ Liz H-H / 10 Comments

© Ayr/Gray (with some editing to birth the story

Many thanks to Jenne Gray and C.E. Ayr for their photo prompt, THE UNICORN CHALLENGE.  01/03/2025). No more than 250 words in length.

The mansion looked fine from the outside, when the sun labored to reach every shadow and warm every corner of this most recent building that no one, living or not, could remember clearly. Tourists delighted in the brush of icy chill during daylight hours, the moan and rattle from towers firmly padlocked “For safety reasons, you understand.” An outdoor boarded-up well was a sitting place of a weeping woman in a lace gown, hair covering her ivory-white face. All part of the attraction.            Continue reading →

Indie Folk Mayhem

/ Liz H-H / 12 Comments

© Ayr/Gray

From Jenne Gray and C.E. Ayr’s photo prompt, The Unicorn Challenge (01/19/2024). No more than 250 words in length. Otherwise, let your creative flag fly!

They played the Farmer’s Market every chance they got. The large Metropolitan area and suburbs had literally hundreds of sites. Being in the Midwest, word did not get around as much as you might’ve expected. Of course, rural areas in the greater part of the state had their own markets, but times were tough. The band had to weigh transportation costs with expected earnings. Gigs paid next to nothing, and people weren’t tipping as much as they used to.  Continue reading →