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Weekly Contest #372
The definitive transition from hot summer to autumn cool occurred on Tuesday, September 13, 1977. He should have known on that auspicious day that something was foreboding. A strong cold front brought severe thunderstorms and heavy rain to the area, permanently breaking the summer heat and plunging temperatures into a sustained, cool autumn pattern for the rest of the month. By late afternoon the sun dipped low over the suburban landscape, casting long, amber shadows across the late season stunted grass. The oppressive summer heat had finall...
Traveling alone from Syracuse, New York to visit family in Dayton, Ohio I was tired, when I found a bed-and-breakfast, The Worthington Mansion near the shores of Lake Erie in Painesville, Ohio. I decided it would be a far more interesting choice than a conventional chain hotel off the freeway. As Worthington was my surname, it felt preordained I should stay there. With the fading blue sky that late March evening, the old Mansion came crisply into view, like déjà vu, it somehow felt like I had been here before. The bed-and-breakfast bricks we...
Weekly Contest #370
“Hey Bob” “What do you want Andy?” “Scoot over” “Now what?” “How would you like to die? Would you rather drown or burn in a fire?” “What kind of question is that?” “I’m just saying Bob, if you had your choice, what would it be? What would you choose?” “I don’t know, I guess drown. Why do you ask?” “It says here that the majority of people, would rather drown? “Yeah, I guess so, it makes sense, it’s more peaceful. Yeah, you never heard of people in Medieval times being drowned at the stake. What would you choose Andy?” “Oh me? I’d rather spon...
Weekly Contest #369
Includes themes of cultural and religious discordance. I inherited my father’s gene of moral right and wrong along with his temper and mother’s gene of patience and compassion. I was an international observer on the panel for Human Rights for the United Nations and found myself racing to catch my flight from New York to Tehran, Iran with connecting flights from Germany and Istanbul. I hurriedly stopped at the Duty-Free store in Berlin. The bright white display with neon lights showcased designer jewelry, watches, and perfumes wrapped in pin...
Weekly Contest #368
Everyone called her Babe. She disliked the name Babs as it reminded her of some early 50’s sitcom character that wore a pink poodle skirt. She was damaged in a way a lot of orphans are. Missing a piece of themselves. Yearning to know her past, the memory of one’s own parental nurture, nurtured from one’s history. Having missed the most basic of human contact, parent and child, she had always felt lost and cheated. The one thing she treasured was a photo of her birth mother Barbara, whom she was named after. She slightly resembled her mother ...
Weekly Contest #367
“C’mon Maxine, let’s go. I’ve had enough” Donny implored more than he demanded. “Hold on Donny, just a minute…Hey Denise, I’m over here!” “Ooh Maxine let’s dance! They’re playing that Captain & Tenille song we both love…Love Will Keep Us Together” Denise eagerly teased reaching for her friend’s hand. “Hurry up Maxxie” he voiced shaking his head. “Well since you won’t dance with me Donny, this is our last Prom! I’m dancing with Denise” “Geez Maxxie, don’t you think we danced enough already tonight?” “It’s our last dance Donny. Please let’s no...
Weekly Contest #366
I should have known better than to come back home to The Netherlands. “Tu! Che diavolo stai guardando?” Meaning, “Hey you! What devil in hell are you looking at?” I was plotting which direction I was going to go in the old part of Amsterdam when a group of young men started yelling out to me in Italian. “Those women are ugly! They keep all the fat ugly ones here near the Oude Kirk” These testosterone laden young men were on vacation, looking to smoke marijuana, gamble and for the sex tourism that our liberal country is known for. I spoke the...
Weekly Contest #365
Did you ever really try, I mean really try to remember your first memory? You try it, try remembering and see if it comes to you like a distant smell you once recalled. A longed-for sweet scent from an exotic flower, you somehow knew or had forgotten about. Sometimes memories are tucked behind our medulla oblongata of the brain and only reveal themselves when they care to, in a dream or some godforsaken nightmare, like some odorous foul smell that you’d rather all but forget but somehow now is stuck in your body like a piece of shrapnel from...
Weekly Contest #359
“Mommy, mommy?” “Is that boy still awake? Damn it girl, I’ve had a long ass day” “Oh, leave him alone, my poor baby doesn’t feel good. If you don’t stop it, you’re gonna have a long ass night all by yourself” Tad was watching the Red Skelton Hour on Cyrus’s new Zenith color TV set before bedtime in mid-October 1966. Tired and slowly chewing his oatmeal raisin cookies with milk, his 5-year-old eyes were heavy and his body cold in his blue and white cowboy pajamas with brown horses and yellow lassos. The thermostat was set at a balmy 66 degree...
Weekly Contest #351
Fame had become like a spotlight that bleached everything that was human about him. In the dark of the old Victorian house, he saw his reflection through the rain-pattered window. The rain had been incessant for what seemed like weeks. “You’re early” Eldred declared “I’m rarely late” He countered from the shadow “My editor is waiting for my final manuscript due tomorrow” he said as he tapped his pipe in the ashtray. “He’s the one who may have to wait. You thought you cheated me. You wrote the contract yourself remember? You were willing to ...
Weekly Contest #349
Today is April 31st, 2032, my city outside my window had changed its skin like a snake. Vengeance Day or what once was called May Day now is now euphemistically known as “My Day” Mentioned so casually like it was some harmless holiday, like Sweetest Day or Arbor Day. It’s been six years since the laws were rewritten after the riots, the referendums, the endless debates about “Rights and Reparations” Once a year on this date, for twelve hours, every law and statute is suspended. No police, no courts, no consequences where anything goes, until...
Weekly Contest #348
Mina Monroe moved to Los Feliz, California with a dream, a cracked iPhone, and a certainty that she would be seen. She always believed in a glow, not the hazy Los Feliz sunrise filtering through her dusty balcony doors, but the sharper, brighter one she chased like so many young girls online. At twenty-six, she was still “aspiring,” to be a Hollywood actress, which in Los Feliz meant waiting tables at Mess Hall and posting daily TikToks from her tiny one-bedroom apartment on Sunset Blvd. Her apartment sat above Café Europa, a coffee shop on ...
Weekly Contest #347
My name is apparently not important to THEM. They never call me anything. In my head I call myself Maeve. It rhymes with Fave and Gave and that is exactly how I feel. I give and I give; I give of myself. Do this and do that when asked. I don’t have many friends and sometimes I feel so very alone. I wish I was one of those schoolgirls who wears too much hairspray, holds too many books and chews gum way too fast. My Maeve would have way too many friends, is overconfident, a beautiful dream dish who likes to pretend. My Maeve would have gotten ...
Weekly Contest #346
“I am Atiwaka. Son of Eagle Claw. This is our land; this is where my people live” I’ve lived on the Great Lake like my father and his father’s father before him. I know who I am, but I do not know why I am here at this time, right now at this moment. I know this place, but not the hour. This place has somehow changed. I am Atiwaka, of the Erieye people. My time was of the Crow, the season of the Deer Moon. We were preparing for the long winter in our long huts, before the snows came when the Seneca arrived from the east, from the land of the...
Weekly Contest #345
The cigar smoke-filled stage reverberated with applause as the gaslights flickered and the thick burgundy velvet curtain descended Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom in the autumn of 1907. A thunderous ovation erupted from the packed house, “Velouté and Garçon! Velouté and Garçon!” the adoring crowd chanted, their cheers echoing off the gilded proscenium. Onstage, the tall, elegant Mr. Velouté, impeccably dressed in his black tailcoat, rose slowly from the gold leafed wooden chair and bowed deeply, his arm draped around the diminutive Pierre Garçon, ...
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