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“Set your story at a retirement or leaving party. ”

Posted in Adults on Sep 23, 2024

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✍️ 18 stories

Letting go

Winner of Weekly Contest #166 🏆

I dedicate this story to my partner and to everyone who has carried or is carrying the burden of grief.Sitting by the bed, holding my hand, you think my mind is fighting against the decision of my body to quit life’s game. My eyes are closed, but I sense your will through the fingers laced tightly around my own. Tenderness is a force and you stake my claim to life through the insistent pressure of your hand. How it has grown over these long years from its immaculate small perfection to this manifestation of adult capability: greeti...

191 likes 144 comments 144
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Master of the Drops

Weekly Contest #166

The Master will be celebrated at nine. An hour later, the King will be dead.  The cause will be natural. An attack of the heart. Tragic thing. Although kings do die young. It’s a known fact. The stress of it all ages them prematurely. The hair grays. The lips chap. They find themselves urinating far too frequently despite not drinking enough water. The King will take to his bed with something of a headache. He will be found the next morning. By then, the Master will be retired to his country house where he plans to spend the remainder...

28 likes 18 comments 18
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The Big Shutdown

Weekly Contest #166

My eyes meet the gaze of the first stars of the evening, and I wonder if they’ll bring us luck as they watch over us tonight. From the hill our neighborhood stands on, I can see the city lights below us, and I feel safe inside my family's house as I watch the last stragglers hurriedly heading home through the twilit streets. They know as well as I do that soon, almost everything will shut down. I can already imagine the darkness.If all goes well, by morning, it should all be back up, and the world will be managed by the much-hyped new versio...

22 likes 9 comments 9
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Eddy and Tom - Part III (Dad's Retirement Party)

Weekly Contest #166

Eddy knew deep down this wasn’t the most fantastic idea. But his mother said it would be okay. She actually pushed him more than usual. And frankly, his mother could be quite annoying about these things. “You need to show Tom you want him to be a part of your life. What better way than to bring him tonight?” “Mom. Don’t you think it’s short notice, and… Dad isn’t exactly crazy about me dating a guy.” “Don’t you worry about your father. He will be so busy saying goodbye to his friends and drinking that he won’t even notice who you brou...

20 likes 14 comments 14
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The Retirement Party

Weekly Contest #166

Retiree Kshitij Punit Aati closed his workstation and leaned back in his chair which bounced gently up and down over its magnetic base. He would miss that reassuring rocking he thought as he tidied his few personal possessions into his carry all. He had spent the morning finalizing the data from his latest project, his last project, he conceded, and was happy to return from his midday break and find that his hypothesis had been confirmed. It was satisfying to be right and even more so to have provided more important data to add to the Collec...

17 likes 0 comments 0
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Of Three

Weekly Contest #166

The banner hung above the bar, in front of him: Good Luck Alice! The party was a bit much: an effigy of Alice’s tendency to overcompensate. The appearance of her newfangled–somewhat legendary–fiance, who was dragging her away to some no-name town in the midwest, was the cherry on top. Raymond hated cherries. Over the music, over the clinking of the glasses, over the mind-numbing small talk of others, he listened to her laugh from her table behind him. Her voice was distinct and familiar: a favorite song played in the background of a film...

15 likes 9 comments 9
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Karoshi

Weekly Contest #166

Suneer’s eyes opened at 5am as they did everyday, his internal clock tuned to the schedule he’s followed for nearly 27 years. With long slow blinks he pulled himself from the lull of dreaming and wriggled his way up to a seating position, pausing every few seconds to wait for the ache in his joints to subside. He spends the next minute coughing a dry painful cough, the unmistakable hacking of a smoker’s lungs. It had been two years since he quit, since his doctors told him the coughing would become easier to bear. Have you thought of retirin...

14 likes 3 comments 3
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Fanfare

Weekly Contest #166

What first hit me was the cold. What I first hit was the printer. Daft to leave the tray poking out over the bin everyone was discarding their cupcake cases in. There were fans on every desk. As well as overhead fans. The flapping of neon post-it notes forming the disco lights of the party. All the windows were wide open, the sounds of gulls and sirens added to the mix of the whirring of the blades and the hens’ clucking going into overdrive as they welcomed me, the new chick. I would like to say it was all in celebration of my arrival bu...

13 likes 4 comments 4
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All the little things

Weekly Contest #166

Sensitive content: themes of deathJohn checked his watch. 5:04pm. 182 days, 60 minutes to go. He wondered when he would stop counting the minutes. He wandered when there wouldn’t be any more minutes to count. The Goodbye and Good Luck banner hung lopsided above a table laden with cupcakes and pastries. He picked at the apple turnover on his plate. It tasted like cardboard. He hoped his sense of taste would return. “Urgh, trust it to rain when I forgot my brolly!” Louise smoothed her wet hair from her face, her glasses spotted with rain...

13 likes 5 comments 5
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The Inevitability of Tomorrow

Weekly Contest #166

Jameson sat in his office and wallowed in his self despair. The department members had come for their slice of cake, made their small talk, and filtered back out to their desks in the common area. He had feigned eating his slice, slowly sliding the plate off of his desk and letting it fall into the trash just a few seconds after digging at it with his plastic fork. The paper cup filled with punch stayed, but he did take the time to top it off with a small flask he kept in the top drawer of his desk. He always found a way to find the quiet mo...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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Thank God It's Summer

Weekly Contest #166

“Happy retirement!” POP! Suddenly it was raining confetti on my desk. My otherwise sparkly clean cubicle had been puked on, but my OCD decided to take a pleasantly timed vacation. My smile grew wider than I knew it could. I look up to see Penn, my boss, holding the empty confetti canon, and wearing a rainbow party hat. Ken, my cubey-neighbor, wore the same triangle hat, but upside down so it looked like he had grown a skittles-beard. His bald face made my shoulders dance with my cheeks. I spun myself around in my chair and landed face-to-fac...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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The False Dawn.

Weekly Contest #166

No one could ever predict this, not even the designers of Sentience Inc. The latest robots had been produced. They rolled off the production line, seemingly perfect. This batch was designed and created to be sex assist robotic companions, each with an interactive responsive human/android interface. These robots were perfect in every way. Except, one sentient robotic brain was a deviant. He quietly went on his first assignment. He was to be a sex assist robotic companion to a mature Christian couple, somewhere down there in the Deep South. Th...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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Time to Retire

Weekly Contest #166

“I wish I had more time”. Claire stared out at the audience, a sea of people she barely knew. Claire had not wanted a retirement party. She had not wanted to retire. Claire was happy at the corporation. She had been happy there for the past 37 years. Claire had hoped she would die at her desk and not alone in her home. Claire did not fear dying but she did not like the thought of her body melting into her bed or the sofa as she slowly decomposed without anyone in the world having noticed or cared that she had gone. Not that she particularly ...

8 likes 1 comment 1
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I Quit

Weekly Contest #166

I Quit It is Christmas Eve, and I have never been separated from this holiday in celebration with my four daughters before. My husband had been fired for the third time in less than one year and I desperately needed employment, specifically for the insurance benefits. I am employed as a nursing assistant at our local nursing home, and my first assignment is covering the entire Christmas holiday, working the 3-11 shift. Gentle wispy snowflakes are dropping, as I enter the locked entryway. The facility does not care that I am prioritizing ...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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What the Party is For

Weekly Contest #166

I’m not a big fan of parties, especially office parties. They’re usually pretty boring, and being the new guy I haven’t really gotten to know a lot of my coworkers. I’ll probably just spend an hour or so holding up a wall, sipping weak punch and eating bland sheet cake. But it has to beat spending another hour trying to transcribe heavily redacted reports, so I’m here. Six weeks I’ve been working at the home office for the vaguely named Interworld Solutions, and this is the first time I’ve heard of Baker. Of course, there’s a lot about my ne...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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