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Weekly Contest #354
Maren Voss has spent seventeen years making maps nobody ever truly reads. She charts dead moons, catalogs debris fields, marks the coordinates of places so remote that the light leaving them won’t reach Earth for another thousand years. She is employed by the Interplanetary Cartographic Archive; a quiet, bureaucratic institution that files her work into databases accessed mostly by automated systems and the occasional academic. She has never been famous. She has never wanted to be. She is fifty-one years old, traveling alone in a survey ves...
Weekly Contest #352
The curtains hang the way curtains do when no one remembers choosing them. Someone chose them once — she might have, even, in a different life, the one where she stood in a shop and held fabric up to a window and made a sound of approval. Now they hang in their particular way, neither open nor closed, letting in a stripe of afternoon that falls across the floor and means nothing. She is smaller than she was. This is the first thing her daughter notices every time she walks in — not a thought, exactly, more like something the body registers...
Weekly Contest #348
The Reflection Looking Forward By Bonnie Gerstenlauer The reflection in my bathroom mirror is someone else. She looks like me, but I know she isn't me. Her movements don't mimic mine. Out of the corner of my eye I see her move when I'm still. You probably think I'm crazy. Maybe I am. Until a couple of days ago, my life was normal It was a cold October afternoon and the sky was its usual dismal gray, the color found only in northern parts of the United States at this time of year. A drizzle fell as I stepped out from my apartment building’...
Weekly Contest #340
Lost In The Edit By Bonnie Gerstenlauer The rain was a persistent drummer, beating a rhythm on the grimy asphalt of the alley. It was a rhythm Jack Malone knew well. It was the rhythm of secrets, of late-night deals gone wrong, of a city that never washed clean, no matter how hard the heavens wept. The neon sign from "The Blue Dahlia" bar flickered, casting a sickly pink glow on the wet brickwork and the unfortunate stiff lying at his feet. Classic case. A dame, a deal, a .38 caliber goodbye. Jack knelt, the brim of his fedora dripping, an...
Weekly Contest #339
Miranda Chen, 42, stands poolside at a corporate wellness retreat in Phoenix. She's a VP at a Fortune 500 company, known for her unshakeable composure and methodical rise through the ranks. The sharp scent of chlorine hits her as the maintenance guy adjusts the chemical levels, and suddenly she's six years old again, terrified of the water, clinging to the edge of the community pool back in Sacramento. The smell brings it all back with startling clarity: Coach Davis. Gentle eyes. Patience that seemed infinite. The way he'd crouch at pool's...
Weekly Contest #338
Julian Croft’s Fractured Mind The air in the crisis room was stale with the scent of coffee and desperation. Detective Miles Corbin stared at the digital clock on the wall. 03:17:52. “Three hours until a thermobaric bomb incinerates three blocks of downtown.” Detective Jane Harper, his partner, shook her head. “And our only lead is lying in a coma two floors below,” frustration evident in her voice. Julian Croft wasn't a terrorist. He was a savant, an architect whose designs were hailed as genius, but whose mind was a fragile, fractured m...
Weekly Contest #337
Marc Whitmore had spent three years, two months, and some days in Riverside Psychiatric Hospital, though he'd stopped counting somewhere around the middle of the third year. The white walls that had once seemed blindingly sterile now felt oddly comforting in their predictability, like old friends who never changed their minds about you. The medication schedules had become as natural as breathing—8 AM, 2 PM, 8 PM—little paper cups filled with pills in varying shades of blue and white, swallowed down with lukewarm water from a plastic cup that...
Weekly Contest #335
Weekly Contest #333
By Bonnie Gerstenlauer The stage was set. The ingredients for my grandmother’s special marinara sauce were neatly arranged on the kitchen counter. The pot of water to cook the vermicelli noodles in was sitting on the stove. My first live-streamed cooking class was about to begin. I was just waiting for my friends Lena, Jake, and Mel to arrive. They had kindly offered to help, and since we hadn’t all been together lately, I thought it would be a fun way to spend time. Lena, whom I met in college, is the proud mother of an adorable baby boy...
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