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Weekly Contest #371
You didn’t know me but you gave me ten dollars. You didn’t know I was ten minutes away from home but you gave me ten dollars. You didn’t know what I’d spend it on but you gave me ten dollars. You gave me ten dollars – me who’d waste it on liquorice twists and coffee, too scared to walk home for having been catcalled in the night. But you, you gave me ten dollars, and I remember. I remember, over a decade later now, sitting on the kerb outside the local 7-11 – the very one I’d walk to with my mum, where my friends and I bought slurpees growin...
Weekly Contest #370
Clatter of cutlery, pancakes half sliced and an espresso knocked back like a shot of tequila. “Bathroom break,” says Zola, rising from her chair, “but first a quick thought experiment!” She’s like this, Zola. Leaves you with something to ponder while she’s gone, albeit briefly. God forbid I check my phone or bite my nails or watch the birds dive. And the birds do dive. Black hailstones sprouting wings. “If you could have brunch with anyone dead or alive, who would it be and why? Besides me.” “Damn, I was going to say you.” Zola scrunches her...
Weekly Contest #361
When a writer is stuck in a rut of not writing, the world becomes dull and blurry as though seen through the milky film of cataracts. Our senses go unused and unrefined, and we no longer strive to describe the sound of a fluttering page, or the smell of chlorine at the local swimming pool. We forget the taste of almonds, and oranges, and everything in between because we stop noticing. So, when a magazine of prose and poetry greets me in the corridor downstairs, lounging on cracked mosaic tiles and stray leaves carried in on shoe soles, dare ...
Weekly Contest #347
I It’s a relief to be alone again. To walk down the promenade, look up at the palm trees, the sky, and know that an hour-long bus ride awaits me, that there’s nobody beside me filling the silence with his condescension and self-importance. My brother, he performs all his ideas. He talks into the darkness, his voice echoes, and he bows to a resounding silence – mine. He says he wants to get to know me better, but he’d replace me with a soundboard in a heartbeat. A street performer’s microphone screeches. A crowd in the distance. I don’t feel ...
1 If you were a city besieged, would you set yourself ablaze? Sometimes, one must destroy themselves to defeat the enemy. Proceed with caution, dear reader, for these journals rot. They are the cottage-cheese-white of thrush, the yellow-brown of a bad apple. They’re cavities – dead, black teeth in the skull that has been my twenties. Journals laid out on the carpet like solitaire. Different lives within. All voices, mine. One open, masochism in scrawl. But first of all, where are we? If it helps, there’s an overflowing laundry basket in the ...
Weekly Contest #345
I’m not a tall woman, quite short. Muscular build, shoulders broad. But I’ve weighed about fifty-eight kilograms since I was twelve. The fat migrated (to more flattering quarters, I hope) but the number itself has held. I take a sip or two (or a cheeky three) of Lupilus, wolf down the frothy beer head, and pull the photos, matte finish, from the paper envelope once more. Browse through them, careful to hold only the edges, not to smudge the surface (you know, as though they’re worth preserving, worth remembering – they’re not). They came out...
Weekly Contest #343
1. “Wear it, Marie,” said Heath, “for a woman does as she’s told.” The brown locks fell about Marie’s forehead, framing her face, and for an instant Heath glimpsed a ghost in the twinkle of her eyes, veiled in part behind a wave of hair. “And stand there by the window. Yes, there in that patch of sunlight.” Marie obliged, and the golden brown gleamed like syrup. “Off with you,” said Heath. Marie made to leave, but he grabbed her wrist, his grip firm as a corset. “The wig,” he said. She removed it, revealing flaxen hair beneath. In his nascen...
Twenty-five minutes in little sticks of fluorescent green. Nora’s weekends, they were now reserved for laundry. She looked up from her laptop at dryers 71 and 72, large and tunnelling eyes at the back of the room. Clothes going round and round, up and drop, white linen within tumbling like sea froth. Mammoth task of going to the laundromat, Nora typed, when you can hardly get out of bed. My sheets, they still stink of last month’s night sweats. She took a sip of the hazelnut espresso she’d bought from the boulangerie across the road, a bite ...
Weekly Contest #336
TIM Tim guffawed at his phone, blue light illuminating his wide eyes. Crinkle of aluminium as he popped a chip in his mouth, wiped the cheesy crumbs on his thighs. Ha, ha, ha. Scroll. Notification. Kate. Wanna meet on Phoenix? Tim swiped away the message as though swatting away a fly. Ha, ha, ha, and thus an hour elapsed. Tim’s eyes ached; dick, hard. New window, VR headset on. Stepsister. Slimy sock. He stepped into the shower where he soaped up his balls, lint in his belly button undisturbed, where it would remain for another two days. You...
Weekly Contest #332
Tonight I cannot, will not, give you a plot. I’m as sick as a dog but at least my fist is healing. Fractured, I thought, when it turned green. Swollen, too, but it’s gone down now. I can press my thumb to my pinkie again, press a shampoo pump without pain. The stranger, he deserved it. Didn’t even catch his name. My electric heater might be making me dizzy – or maybe I’m dehydrated. A baguette and cheese for lunch probably didn’t help. McDonald’s, neither. Nor my thirteen-hour workdays which are, I admit, the best part of my day. Necessary, ...
Weekly Contest #322
They measure us against labels. You know, boyfriend, husband, that kind of stuff. Exclusivity, it means you’re doing things right. Nonmonogamy, probably not. You’re either being sold short in your relationship or you’re the side chick. Why settle for less, right? Aspire to more, know your worth, etc. But maybe Nora didn’t measure herself, or them, against those standards. Maybe she just liked being with him. Maybe he was her best friend here. Maybe she was learning that love was not possession. She, she was the side chick; and he, in an open...
Shortlisted for Weekly Contest #320 ⭐️
There are holes in my walls again – my home, it’s a leaky bucket. I stuff them with aluminium, €1.95 a roll; it’s what I can afford, and what I’m willing to spend. A mice infestation is the landlord’s problem, but it’s normal, they tell me. Oh, and make sure to sweep up any crumbs in your studio. That’s what they’re coming for. But I keep all my food in the fridge and microwave – even my pasta, and even my scraps. I wonder, sometimes, if it’s my thoughts they’re feeding on, my thoughts that let them in. I mean, there’s nothing else in here b...
Weekly Contest #317
If you could travel to the future, would you? Would you risk knowing an outcome and thereby realising it, ensnared in a self-fulfilling prophecy that mightn’t have eventuated had you not known? On the nightstand sat a silver bowl like a miniature satellite dish or a metal hibiscus, an antenna in its centre. “So, it’s a time machine?” said Melissa, cross-legged on white sheets. “Not quite,” said Nora. “It’s a time dish – it collects signal, waves, from existing superpositions yet to be collapsed.” “Alternate realities, then?” “Alternate poten...
Weekly Contest #315
I read somewhere that we’re all a decision away from an entirely different life. Only, we don’t know it, not always, not often, because we either fail to make a choice or, when we do, we never see the alternative outcomes – not without tinted glasses, that is. And it begs the question: do we ever actually live? This life, I mean, not the inebriating nostalgia of what ifs. Tracing paper spread across the table, bare nails, 2B lead. “This,” said Nora, “is a collapse.” She tapped a circle on the page from which two thick lines branched out, one...
Weekly Contest #313
1. How loud is a sigh? As loud as the clatter of pans, the bang of a door slammed, a church organ rumbling through you? How about an eyeroll? The silent treatment? Were they half as loud as the voice in Nora’s head? Came in spirals, it did. Looping on repeat, kind of like the swirls she used to draw as a girl, filling double-sided A4 pages. Where’d that voice come from anyway? And she’d almost put her finger on it. She’d almost put her finger on it one afternoon at the post office. Her mother sighed audibly, fidgeting with self-service machi...
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