Writing Prompt Magpies bad luck

This weeks writing prompt is a magpie. One of my very first published pieces, The Gruesome End of Mr Todd was fortunate enough to share space with some some fabulous writers not least a truly wonderful poem about magpies. If you haven’t picked this up, then I really recommend that you do. Sadly there is no Ebook but you can pick up the paper back for the price of a coffee on Amazon. It definitely worth it.

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Coming back to Magpies I can think of loads of examples where they have featured in stories, and Dickens played on their topsy – turvie, good luck- bad luck nature when he called the mysterious convict Magwitch in his best novel Great Expectations. Magpies do feature in my own short story Blackbirds which you can check out on this web site or in flash fiction magazine

Blackbirds

but I’ve chosen a different extract for my example. It’s from my work in progress, so I would love to hear your comments as well as your own writing in the comments.

Woman on board

I walked up the gangplank on to the RV Harpy a few days later, dressed in a blue and white sailor suit, with a cap set at a jaunty angle. Lottie wore the same matching outfit.

No sooner did I set foot on deck than I heard a holler. “Captain, what is this? A woman on board We can’t have that. It’s bad luck.”

“Relax Mr Mate,” said Captain Bligh. “It’s not a woman, it is two women.” And at his word, Lottie alighted on board in her uniform. We were like twins, not identical twins, but where one twin and taken all the beauty and life from both of them and was twice as beautiful as any woman, and the other, me, left twice as plain.

“Well, that’s alright then,” said Mr Mate. It appears that women like magpies were not to be trusted on their own. But two, a couple, magpies or women, that was apparently quite alright. Although I would imagine that two magpies could easily get up to twice as much mischief as one. And so too with women.