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Weekly Contest #329
There is a ghost in the attic. I hear it, late at night, scuffling around up there with the rats and the sheltering birds. I hear it howling like the wind, something mournful and terribly human, too human. It (the psychics and priests and exorcists all tell me to call it ‘it’, tell me that it is no longer any kind of human soul) has been haunting me for years. Sometimes I go up in the morning and look at the damage it’s done, the boxes upturned, the old books and action figures flung wildly about the rafters. Sometimes, it is still there, in...
Weekly Contest #99
She breathes in the dark. Behind the four fragile walls of her bedroom she hides in the dark and breathes in the atmosphere of solidarity. Curled against the pale wood of her bed frame, she huddles as if a stray dog in the cold. Head buried in the soft, welcoming folds of her inner elbows, her tears drop on the dark stained wood, painted carefully by her mother. Her mother, who argued that the paleness of the birch was too plain to be comforting. Her mother in her own waves of friendliness and anger, her mother like the stained birch wood in...
Weekly Contest #74
A year from now, she’d be married. She’d be curled up in bed with a stranger and a glass of champagne and the title of the next year as a crown atop her head. A year from now she’d be smiling and happy and loved. She’d have a stable job, a house with two stories, a stranger and a glass of champagne. She told herself this, with a hand wrapped around a cold glass. Whiskey, not champagne, but at least she had the crowd of strangers around her, like curtains on a stage, and her at the bar in her costume of a woman alone on New Years Eve. He wa...
Down the river, around the bend, washing over the hours I’ve spent… alone. White walls caging in white floors, white tiles, the adhesive between the edges all I have to work with. White tiles, white walls, white memories make white rooms. Wallpaper peeling, wrapping back up - adhesive between the tiles. I walk my fingers along the grooves between the whiteness, as if through a… trail? Words I didn’t know I knew, words I forget. Memories I think I had long ago. A white room, white tiles, and white walls, and a tendency to suck the so...
Weekly Contest #63
By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. Red, orange, yellow squares of a quilt, with branches as seams between them. The sun set behind them, lighting the whole thing ablaze. This morning, the fog had allowed a mere glimpse of them, as if little blazing sparks had been tossed from the heavens in the early hours of the day. I found myself standing underneath this open flame until the sun had gone down, and still I was lingering there for a half hour or so. The leaves had turned from red to brown with the dimming light, and I ...
Weekly Contest #56
Above the sink, in the twin brown cupboards, a set of ceramic dishes lay in a nest of dust and spiderwebs. When was the last time he had needed to dig out more than the one plate he used every day? Eat, wash, dry, repeat. Morning, noon, night. 6, 12, 6. How long ago did he stay up with a flashlight and a book? How long ago did he sleep in until noon? Under the twin brown cupboards, under the relentless fountain of water, he rubbed his hands together. He returned the soap bar to its bed. He rinsed off his hands. He shut the water off. He shu...
Weekly Contest #54
When I was younger, I didn’t believe in soulmates. I thought love was fake. I came up with excuses down to my limited knowledge of the biology of mating. In my mind, humans didn’t stay together because we were meant to be polygamists, like dolphins or tigers. I thought we just placed ourselves too high on the evolutionary scale, that our natural instinct was to be with as many people as possible, keep the species going or whatever. But dolphins still love each other. They give their girls marine sponges and seaweeds like we give ours flowers...
Weekly Contest #49
The man had grey leathery skin like the outside of a purse passed down through generations. Sunspots danced over the wrinkles of his hands, his cheeks, his forehead. His fingers were short and bulbous, the joints rusted over with arthritis. Bags crouched beneath his eyes, shiny and bloated and slinking slowly down his cheeks. His eyes themselves were a dull brown, cloudy with age. They flitted over every surface in the room - the cherry wood coffee table in the middle, the light pink chairs lining three of the four walls, the news magazines ...
Weekly Contest #43
Her beady eyes stare up at me, unblinking. I know she can’t really see, but it scares me to have this little bundle of nerves and skin and blood and fat staring up at me like it exists. She exists, I have to say to myself over and over again. Her little black eyes look at me like I owe her something. I’ve already given her everything I have and here she is asking for more, and I know she’ll keep asking for more. Everyone around me is smiling, like I should be happy. My husband squeezes my leg but I can barely feel it with all the drugs they ...
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