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Weekly Contest #356
Along for the Ride She stood on the 7th floor in between a tall potted fern and a half-empty water cooler. Or perhaps it was half full. Was she an optimist or a pessimist when it came to five-gallon water jugs? The elevators in this building were slow, so she stood listening, in spite of herself, to the chitchat of the secretaries behind her. She never was entirely comfortable while waiting for the elevator. Nowhere to look but straight ahead. It was going on lunchtime, and she was carrying her sack lunch to bring to the park across the stre...
Weekly Contest #355
Gina had a secret. She had a secret that Vanessa knew but Raoul did not. Raoul had a secret. He had a secret that neither Tamara nor Gina knew. But the waiter in those snappy fitted black trousers certainly did. Davis had a secret. He had a secret that he hoped to share with Gina after dessert. Gina, and everyone else, obviously. But mostly Gina, his comely girlfriend with her bouncing blonde ringlets and deep mocha-brown eyes. His secret was building and blurring and making concentration more difficult. What had Tamara just said to him? Sh...
Weekly Contest #354
Once he sent her a Valentine. They were in third grade, and he made it himself. He cut out the construction paper, and he glued the lace on the edges, and he wrote her name and “I love you" in big black letters. They didn’t know what love was. But they knew the words belonged on a ruby paper heart. She kept the card forever pressed between her favorite pages of a gilded, hardbound collection of fairy tales. And she never showed it to anyone else. Because nobody else would understand. Once he sent her a parking ticket. He had been loitering i...
Weekly Contest #353
You can learn how to crochet granny squares on YouTube, and you can memorize a recipe to make a peach-infused Sex on the Beach. You can master bleaching your hair, follow a Disco Fox tutorial, build a mini-replica of the Colosseum using gluten-free pretzel sticks. But Joe was the last man on earth who knew how to kiss. The scientists had predicted this might happen. They’d sifted through the data as the young people became more isolated, addicted to their screens, unable to preen or flirt or attract one another in the standard, old-fashioned...
Weekly Contest #352
After serving the most persnickety customer in the world (and possibly the universe), Stella needed to catch a break. But the next man in line ordered a #17 minus the bacon, which was the actual point of the #17. It was a bacon sandwich. He said, “Minus the bacon,” plus some pedestrian cheese, minus the aioli, with a little mustard. She made the sandwich as he ordered because that was her job, but it didn’t stop her from eye rolling as she did so. He thanked her in a way that made her squint at him to make sure he wasn’t taking the piss. But...
Weekly Contest #351
The three old ladies sat in the semi-darkness, sewing. There was a tray on a table in front of them, piled high with spools of different colored threads. In their baskets, lay beating, broken, cracked and oozing, liquid-dripping, red and panting, construction-paper-laced, edges faded, torn and unraveling hearts. The sign on the front door read: “Hearts, Mended. Inquire within.” Once clear and bright in gold leaf, the paint was now chipped and missing bits of serif. The hours had long been erased. There was a tinkling bell over the door. The ...
Weekly Contest #350
“What time is it?” Kelsie asks, looking over the wreckage of the dinner table. It feels both late and early, which in a way exactly what two a.m. is. Her long blonde hair is usually up in a crisp twist, but she’s let it down. While Harrison watches, she twirls a finger lazily around one perfect curl. George pours himself another glass of chardonnay, and he says, “What’s time to a pig?” and before Kelsie can wrap her tipsy brain around the question in order to get offended, Eileen smacks George on the shoulder and says, “NO NO NO. That’s the ...
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...
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