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Weekly Contest #349
It was an apocalyptic break-up. A scorched-earth end to a relationship that had been heading toward forever, with the first stop a two-step down the aisle. Everything in Eleanor’s world was on fire. Singed beyond ash. Ever since she had found Lucien with her… never mind. Doesn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Yes it did! It mattered. The whom he had chosen to cheat on her with (her bff! her maid of honor! her bestie who wore the other half of a broken-heart necklace), and the place they’d been in (her bed!), and the fact that every last one of her f...
Weekly Contest #348
“I don’t believe in it.” “It?” “I don’t believe you can talk to the dead. Or ghosts, or whatever.” That was Isabella, with the carrot-orange hair who used pretzels as a cigarette substitute when at work. Pretzel sticks constantly dangling from the corner of her mouth. Isabella from accounting, pushing back on the entire concept. She’d seen the postcard on the fridge in the break room, and she was waving the pink card in the air to make her point. “You can,” Steve had said. “I was there. I went last weekend.” Not talking directly to Shanna, b...
Weekly Contest #346
Once upon a time… That’s the way the fairy tales traditionally start…. “Once upon a time.” (They don't all end with happily ever afters. But some do.) Their meet was cute. But unexpected. Trixie had always thought she’d ultimately run into someone who would match her style, and maybe she was single at 29 because her style was sort of… well… that is to say… avant-garde. “It’s not avant-garde,” her mother liked to groan. “It’s bat sh—.” “Sh. Avant-garde.” She had curls that you could boing, or you might want to if she were standing in line in...
Weekly Contest #345
Irving Miller, Irv to his friends and Uh oh, here comes Irv to his bowling buddies, didn’t appreciate when people got too close to him. Not emotionally, mind you, but physically. He was a joy to be around, according to his wife, god rest her, but he wasn’t into back slaps or nudges, shoulder rubs or bear hugs. A wink was just fine in his book. At 81, he generally could speak up for himself without anyone giving him too much grief. Age had some benefits, in his humble opinion, although he wasn’t a fan of the creaks in his joints. He wouldn’t ...
Weekly Contest #344
You know those moments when you’re lying in bed, reliving some mortifying moment from 25 years ago in which you inserted your foot (or some other body part) into your mouth (or some other orifice)? The slick-looking, ginger-haired man turned his head here and gave a little wink. Unkind, Please Rewind can fix that in a jiffy. All you need to do is come down to our local store front, pay your $99.99, and we’ll enter the time and date of your faux pas into our nifty little highly safe device. Go back to that bad date, the dinner party, the fig...
Weekly Contest #343
He was in her line again. Tall, dark, and oh my god. Talk, dark, and yes please with a side of frosting. Was he buying buttercream? She surreptitiously glanced at his sole item on the asphalt gray conveyor belt, but couldn’t tell which flavor because the label was faced away. Millie, with the slow drawl and the ginger-hued beehive, had named him after the first time he’d come in. Day one, she’d called him Mr. Dreamboat, because he really was. He had the look that made Janie go a little weak in the knees. Casually handsome with some rough edg...
Weekly Contest #342
Nobody stands in the rain on purpose. Nobody stands outside on the wettest night of the year in no raincoat, the pelting drops making their glasses unusable, the damp growing and spreading. You have to be really ucked-up to ignore the sternly delivered weather report, to forgo the battered, second-hand raincoat hanging by the door or even the umbrella left by a friend, to go outside and stand in the storm for no reason at all. Raymond was that ucked-up. He had been through the mill, the gist, the this and the that. He had lost the things and...
Viola had officiated 7,062 weddings at the little chapel, the type of tiny chapel in the type of backwater town where people come to get married so they can say they were joined at the junction of Happily Boulevard and After Drive. She had seen 7,062 beginnings to 7,062 fairy tales, women in white, sometimes men in white, sometimes two women, sometimes three, although they didn’t all stand up at the front together, but she’d noted people in the pews mouthing the words in tandem with the bride and the bride or the groom and the groom. Or some...
Weekly Contest #341
Do you remember believing in wishes? Do you remember thinking that if you wished on enough falling stars and tossed enough shiny pennies and blew out enough birthday candles, perhaps your dreams would come true? Joe died at 37, and I was 26, and there isn’t any reason or rhyme to this story. He died at 37, and I am nearly twenty years older than that now, but I am thirty years older than when I received the news. I didn’t believe the words across the crackling phone line. Some information isn’t digestible. You don’t fully comprehend the blac...
Weekly Contest #340
—Don’t do that!—Lisa looked around, confused. She was seated at a small, round table in the window of her favorite coffee shop. Her battered laptop was open in front of her. She had a half-filled diner mug at her side.—Seriously—Again, she glanced to her right and left. There was a violet-haired woman wearing emerald headphones leaning against the wall. An older man with an inordinate amount of packages under his table was shoving a croissant into his mouth as fast as she’d ever seen anyone eat. She realized the words were coming from her co...
Weekly Contest #330
I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. See, there are kisses and there are KISSES. You can engage in an underlined one. Or one in italics. Bold or regular. There are kisses you forget almost immediately afterwards, and kisses that linger for forty years. So that when you think back, you bite your lip and look off into the distance, and you can still feel his hands in your hair and his body against yours, and most importantly his lips. Oh, his lips. I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. Let’s get that straight right up front. I wasn’t supposed ...
She said, “I like my coffee like I like my men. Late at night and a little depressed.” He was intrigued and moved one stool closer to her at the bar. He’d never seen anyone drinking black coffee with the intensity she had been doing all night. It had to be hot. The bartender continually made fresh pots. This chick didn’t wince or flinch, and although there was sugar on the bar, she hadn’t touched her spoon. “So you’re a purist?” he asked. “You could say that.” “What makes coffee depressed?” "What makes anyone depressed?” she asked. “You tell...
Weekly Contest #329
“You know this is why you're single, right?” Jake asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Ace could have said the same thing right back at him. Jake often had a little catsup somewhere on his person. Instead, Ace spun his butter knife on the table, as if he were going to make the stainless balance on the tip. “You have to stop with the nonsense,” his ex-former future brother-in-law said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Yeah you do. The numbers, man. All you do is talk to people about numbers.” Numbers followed Ace—or vi...
Weekly Contest #328
“You can’t go back in time for $17,” Randall said. “I can,” Meg insisted. “It doesn’t make any sense. It costs twenty times that to take the trip unless you do stand-by. Most people want to go back in time to fix something big. You know that. You’ve read the articles, right? You get how this tech works.” “That’s why I’ve got to go. I need to fix something.” She steeled herself and looked directly into his eyes. She really wanted him to understand. “I didn’t have the money to lose. Losing seventeen bucks changed everything.” He’d heard the st...
Weekly Contest #325
Cassandra could sense when Calvin was getting ready to leave work. He would be shifting his mask, taking off his “Work” Calvin face and putting on his “Home” Calvin face, tying the knots under his straw-blond hair. Even though his office was downtown, and it took at least 30 minutes to get back to their little bungalow, she had a feeling when he lifted his briefcase, said goodbye to his secretary, Trish, and headed to the parking garage. She’d speed up then, fixing everything the way “Home” Calvin liked. Glossy magazines that featured his th...
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