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Weekly Contest #376
The man in the chair has stopped trying to scream. Daniel Marsh notes this with something close to gratitude. Screaming is loud and pointless, and the cellar has already taken enough of his patience tonight. Now there is only the ragged sound of the man breathing through his nose, the tick of the old furnace cooling, and the single bare bulb swaying on its cord, throwing light and shadow across the stranger's wide, wet eyes. Daniel sits on an overturned crate across from him, hands loosely clasped between his knees. A quiet man in a cardigan...
Weekly Contest #371
The Clothes We Leave Behind By: C.J. Riley The laundromat closed at eleven. Eli waited until 11:30. He'd been sitting across the street beneath the broken awning of the closed pharmacy, watching the neon sign in the laundromat window flicker between OPEN and nothing. At 11:16, the sign went dark. At 11:20, Eli crossed the street. The lock on the side door was older than he was. That was the first thing he'd noticed three nights earlier when he'd walked past and seen the owner struggling with a key ring after closing. The second thing he'd n...
Weekly Contest #362
Bon Appétit By: C.J. Riley The onions were almost translucent when my guest woke. They are not quite ready. Another thirty seconds and they would surrender completely to the heat, sweetening into the butter until neither ingredient could be singled out as to where one ended, and the other began. Perfection could not be rushed. I glanced toward the dining chair. The ropes had held. Good. It would have been disappointing if they hadn't. "You've excellent timing," I said, stirring slowly with a wooden spoon polished smooth from years of use....
Weekly Contest #357
Every year, they told the story wrong. Children sat cross-legged in the town square beneath the bronze statue of King Aldrick the Bright with the Hero Rowan, their faces turned upward like flowers to the sun. The magistrate’s voice rolled over them, rich and practiced, reciting the tale they all knew by heart: how Sir Rowan had crossed the poisoned Ashen Vale, climbed the jagged heights of Blackspire Mountain, and struck down Malakar the Dark with his final, heroic blow. How good had triumphed over evil. How the kingdom had been saved The sa...
Weekly Contest #351
People think they come to me for answers. They don’t. They come because they already know the moment that broke them. The library never announces itself. It appears only when someone can no longer pretend. No maps. No memory of the journey. Just the sudden hush of the outer door and the long, low room waiting. There are no books. Only doors. Hundreds at first glance. Thousands if you let your eyes adjust. Each one singular: scarred oak, chipped gray paint, brass worn to satin, some with no handle at all. Beneath every door spills a thin blad...
Weekly Contest #349
The stew tasted like dust and success, but mostly like dust. Mom had traded two jars of her pickled beets, the last of last summer’s crop, for a scrawny rabbit and a handful of real potatoes from the settlement trader who still pretended coin meant something out here in the Western Anarchy Zone. Dad had come home an hour before sunset with a small bottle of vinegar clutched in his fist like a trophy. He swore he won it in a poker game behind the store, but I didn’t believe him. Dad didn’t play cards. He just knew how to look like he did when...
Weekly Contest #347
The fish arrived alive. That was how Marco Neeri had always insisted upon it, even in the early years when the insistence cost more than it was worth. The restaurant was barely breaking even, and his sous chef, a capable, tired man named Dwight, would look at the tanks bubbling in the back corner and say nothing. Some arguments weren't arguments. They were theology. Dover sole, langoustines, the occasional turbot that Marco would carry from the delivery van himself, arms soaked to the elbow. He held each fish for a moment before placing it i...
Weekly Contest #345
Everyone in town knew about the hour, but not when or who decided, or why it came to be. Just once a year, on the same night the leaves finally let go, time loosened its grip for sixty minutes. During the hour, you could hear the unsaid. Not spoken aloud. Not exactly. It arrived as a pressure behind the eyes, a warmth in the chest, a voice that wasn’t a voice but still carried meaning as a whisper carried on the wind. Most people avoided it. They stayed indoors. Put on music. Drank themselves stupid. The unsaid had a habit of arriving uninvi...
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