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Weekly Contest #375
Was a small town in France or Belgium worth dying for? By December of 1944, countless such insignificant villages in the countryside, barely on the map, had claimed many a young life. Saint-Laurent was proof of that. It was a small Belgian village of stone houses gathered around a church whose bell had disappeared sometime during the occupation. A narrow road entered from the west, passed a bakery, the church and a collection of houses, then climbed toward wooded hills to the east. There was a school with broken windows, a blacksmith's shop...
Weekly Contest #373
By the time Richard Salama pulled into the visitors’ parking lot of Alden Manufacturing, most of the people who worked there were preparing to head out for the weekend. It was 4:37 on a Friday afternoon, and the enormous brick-and-steel complex had already begun its weekly exhalation. Cars streamed through the employee gate. Men and women emerged from side doors carrying lunch boxes and jackets. Beyond the administration building, the factory stretched for nearly a quarter of a mile, a collection of high windowless structures connected by l...
Weekly Contest #372
Arthur Kessler had always been a private man, although his family disagreed about exactly when privacy had become an obsession. His daughter Laura thought it had grown worse after their mother, Helen, died six years earlier. Her brother Michael disagreed. Their father had always been that way, he said; their mother had simply understood him better than the rest of them did. At seventy-eight, Arthur's habits were deeply ingrained, and he regarded his desire for privacy not as an eccentricity but as something entirely reasonable. He was not ...
Weekly Contest #370
All his life, Adrian Fatslap had been waiting for his art to be recognized. He had been waiting since age nineteen, when he abandoned the accounting program his father had chosen for him and enrolled instead at the School of Fine Arts, announcing to his horrified parents that he intended to devote his life to painting. His parents asked how he would make a living. Adrian had been confident in his decision and his likelihood of success. He had remained certain through his twenties, when certainty was easy. He painted in a succession of che...
Weekly Contest #367
Dr. Helena Arendt had already traveled into the past once. Her first journey had taken her to Vienna in the early nineteenth century, where she had spent several weeks with Ludwig van Beethoven. She had brought back many hours of video showing the composer not as the remote genius preserved in portraits and biographies, but as a living man: brilliant, difficult, suspicious, funny, impatient, and unmistakably human. Meeting him had taught Helena that seeing a historical figure up close did not necessarily diminish greatness. Sometimes it mad...
Weekly Contest #366
The path to Moriah wound upward through dry hills where only stubborn shrubs and scattered olive trees found enough life to survive. Abraham had walked those roads before, but never with feet so heavy. Beside him came Isaac, no longer a small child but old enough to carry the wood for the offering and old enough to notice that his father, ordinarily a man whose confidence calmed everyone around him, had become strangely silent. For nearly two days they spoke little. The servants remained respectfully behind, sensing that something solemn hu...
Weekly Contest #365
The year was 1942. For thirty-one days the Valley had belonged to no one. The disputed ground lay between two ridges of the Formicida Mountains, a fertile ribbon of green sheltered from the harsh conditions beyond. Water was plentiful there. Food was plentiful there. From high above, the Valley appeared insignificant. Yet commanders on both sides understood its importance. Hidden springs fed the Valley even during the harshest heat, and its fertile soil produced resources that could not be found elsewhere in the region. Whoever controlled...
Weekly Contest #362
Sentenced to hang for the murder of his wife, Frank Stemmer had not for one moment stopped proclaiming his innocence. The trial was fairly straightforward. Circumstantial evidence all pointed in his direction. Three eyewitnesses saw a man who fit Frank’s description running from the murder scene, and all three identified him in a police lineup. A smudged fingerprint on the murder weapon was a partial match. Prosecuting attorneys detailed the crime in exquisite detail, and laid out the motive quite eloquently. According to the prosecution, ...
Weekly Contest #354
Maribel Diaphanousky did not merely enjoy food. She orchestrated it. Her kitchen functioned less like a room and more like a bustling airport, with snacks taking off and landing at all hours. The toaster worked overtime. The fridge lightbulb had been replaced at least twice during the past year, although the new LED bulb was expected to have a longer lifespan. Mara believed in balanced meals. For example, if she had a cheeseburger in one hand, she made sure to hold a milkshake in the other. Symmetry mattered. Breakfast was a philosophical...
Weekly Contest #353
Dr. Irina Polavina did not set out to change the world. Her target was much more mundane. She simply wanted to rid the world of grey hair. Studies by her laboratory at the Virology Center of the University of California confirmed that a modified flu virus, directed toward the DNA in melanin stem cells, could turn off their regulatory genes, preventing the inevitable appearance of grey hair as people aged. Dr. Polavina saw the development of this gene therapy as a major step forward in medical knowledge, but also recognized the absolutely i...
Weekly Contest #351
“My upcoming recital at Carnegie,” he would say, stirring his coffee with the solemnity of a conductor lifting a baton. “I’m thinking late spring. The acoustics favor Chopin.” Elliot Veresi lived in a small apartment where the Steinway piano took up most of the space and nearly all the oxygen. The neighbors had grown accustomed to the daily weather pattern: a storm of scales that never quite aligned, arpeggios that stumbled like loose stairs, and pieces that began with ambition and ended in quiet collapse. Yet Elliot spoke of his future ca...
Weekly Contest #350
Steven Snapradish had never envisioned himself a matinee idol. To be fair, most babies are not “lookers” when first born. Many tend to resemble lightbulbs, grapefruits or bowling balls. But Steven Snapradish had them all beat. During his childhood, even his grandparents found ways of avoiding the traditional hyperbole over their little grandson’s looks. Rather than gloat about how adorable he was, his grandparents would tend to reference his health. “He’s a very healthy child,” his grandmother would extol. And the neighbors would all agre...
Weekly Contest #348
John Stenheimer wanted to kill someone. And not just anyone. He wanted to kill a Black man or a Jew. Either one would do; it didn’t really matter. As the leader of a local neo-Nazi group in a Southern state, he had to set an example for his followers. He had just earlier given a powerful, riveting speech to his acolytes, leading them in the chant, “Blood and soil! Blood and soil! Jews and Negros will not replace us!” John Stenheimer had all the visible requisites of a neo-Nazi. His blond hair was styled in a crewcut. He had the tattoo of a...
Weekly Contest #346
On the telemetry console aboard Orbital Station Asteria, a valve indicator flickered for just a second. On Earth, a monitoring computer in Houston logged a transient pressure irregularity in the maneuvering system of the attached exploration craft Aurora. The computer flagged it as a curiosity. No alarm sounded. Up on the station, Commander Elena Markovic floated beside the hatch, checking the tethers on a supply pod. “Ready to detach?” asked Flight Engineer Daniel Cho. Elena glanced out the viewport. Earth hung below them like a luminous...
Weekly Contest #343
From: Arthur Bellweather To: Lionel Crane Subject: Delivery Schedule Dear Mr. Crane, I note with some confusion that the shipment promised for Monday has failed to materialize. While delays do occur, I had not anticipated that your firm would redefine Monday as an abstract philosophical concept. Please advise. Regards, Arthur Bellweather •••••• From: Lionel Crane To: Arthur Bellweather Subject: Re: Delivery Schedule Dear Mr. Bellweather, Your impatience is noted. The shipment was delayed due to unforeseen logistical complications, a...
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