vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
watch ⌚

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

Comments

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Jonathan had drawn the midnight radio watch, so here he sat in the airship's control car, half watching the pilot at the wheel and half watching the moonlit ground going by beneath them. Now and again he'd see the glimmer of one of those newfangled pressurized-gas lanterns as some farmer went out to check a cow about to calve or a sow about to farrow.

A man could fall asleep on a night like this. Jonathan took another gulp from the covered mug of coffee. This was a commercial freight hauler, not a Navy vessel, so no hanging from a yardarm for a man who fell asleep on watch. But with the new Federal law that all airborne traffic must maintain a round-the-clock radio watch, for the radioman falling asleep on duty was no longer merely a firing offense. And he had no desire to spend the next ten to twenty as a guest of Uncle Sam.

[marycatelli]

Crucial.

[marycatelli]

It weighed so heavily, and worse, it was so hot. Even, in the shade where sunlight never pierced the leaves for as much as a fleck of light on the dead leaves.
She tried to watch for the men, but between the shadows and how they moved, she could not.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

To the layperson's eye it looked like an unusually large pocket watch, the lid over the crystal worked in tiny seed pearls to suggest rolling waves and a distant ship. But I knew it was no ordinary watch, but a marine chronometer, a device of clockwork so precise that it could maintain a reference time within a fraction of a second on a journey around the world, through all sea states from utterly becalmed to the worst waves a ship could endure.

Once these devices had been worth their weight in gold, and a merchanter's master and captain might go into debt to buy one, hoping that it would pay for itself through the time savings of open-ocean navigation over having to follow the coast. In a world encircled by beacons in the sky that could tell one's position within mere centimeters, it had become regarded as an antique, a curiosity. Even the US Navy no longer had its midshipmen learn to navigate by sextant and chronometer.

However, I still took my daily sun sightings, part as a discipline, to keep the old skills alive, and partly out of awareness of what an unstable world we lived in. Already key military and civilian communications satellites have been hacked by our enemies. I could foresee the day when ships at sea suddenly found themselves without the navigation signals upon which they depended, and no idea how to go about navigating without them.

Even if there weren't much I could do to help them, at least I wouldn't be adding to the problem.

[marycatelli]

Ah, the good old ways

[marycatelli]

"Watch out!"
Marcus started and nearly upset his bucket. It was not shouted at him but at a small boy tearing through the bracket. Marcus seized the bucket and lifted it over the boy's head. Just as well, he thought, though his heart hammered. The boy would have upset it.