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Submitted to Contest #286
I wouldn’t have done it had she stayed of her own volition. Her legs don’t quite fit, and she lies crumpled like a ragdoll, her torso in the suitcase, her limbs hanging out like the petals of a flower opening at daybreak. I learned about nyctinasty on a walk home from high school once. I’d thought flowers were forever open once bloomed. Nope, said my classmate. I was wrong. Anyway, that’s beside the point. Gorgeous, she is, even in this state. Odd, though, to see Nora so weak. To have felt her wriggling beneath my grip like a fly buzzing wil...
Submitted to Contest #284
Sometimes, we’re sent signs. Sometimes, we invent them. Who’s to say what’s what, and where do we draw the line? Claim it’s frequency or confirmation bias. Call it intervention, divine. Nora hadn’t left the house with the occult shop in mind. She’d strolled down an unexplored road, its unturned cobble stones, and familiar yet novel sense of grey – new globs of phlegm and dry gum and cigarette butts and candy wrappers. A window of ribbons like serpent tongues. Bags in shop windows, shoes, handwritten price tags. A florist, potted plants on tr...
Submitted to Contest #280
They tell us not to write of dreams, don’t they? as though we all had friends, and lovers and enemies; as though I had an elaborate kit of oil colours, tubes squished and squeezed, some neglected entirely awaiting acknowledgement. Oh, the privilege to have connections.But I lack even the primary colours. If anything, I’ve got a lead pencil, an eraser, and a sharpener that bites too hard. Snaps the lead off if I’m not careful. What I mean to say, dear reader (with all this nonsense!) is that I will write about my damned dreams for they’re all...
Submitted to Contest #279
When I first opened my eyes, they thought my pupils were dilated. But it’s a rare mutation, aniridia. Not so rare here, though. We’ve all got it besides Jacob who’s got coloboma. His pupils leak into his irises like a cell failing to divide in two, stuck in telophase like some metamorphosed insect halfway out its chrysalis. If a chrysalis were an inkblot, that is. The Rorschach test. What do you see? It’s strange, eye contact with Jacob. To stare into the leakage, the oil spill.He said looking at me was just the same. Like staring into two b...
Shortlisted for Contest #276 ⭐️
Maybe I’m trying to see shape, structure, where there is none. Good morning. Glass of ginger tea. Paper tag mangled: a little origami nothing. Now let’s unscrunch last Thursday. Wow, has it been a week already?I didn’t see him, not at first, even though he was right in front of me, approaching. I scanned the tables outside, unfamiliar faces, and made to go inside – and that’s when I saw him. Quite small, very thin, dressed in dull blues and greys, a windbreaker. He’d almost camouflaged into the pavement, the drab greens and browns of the str...
Submitted to Contest #272
I only watch her because I care. There she is, a small dot moving across the screen. Another sip. Another toke. The room swells with smoke. Spirals. I magnify the pub she’s entered, check the photos. Street view. Who’s she with? And how is it that she got over me so quick? Proof. It’s proof that she never cared. Proof that I was right. Unless, of course, these men are a rebound. Bars, a refuge. Beer, a distraction. Surely, I meant more to her than that. Bitch.But God, the craving fucking hits and my gums throb, my canines ache. Small dot on ...
Submitted to Contest #268
Blair was never particularly creative – at least, she didn’t think so. In high school, her friends had taken visual arts, photography, music and drama. She was always at their showcases, always in the audience, always a guest (once even a muse!) but never the artist herself. And at university, she’d taken forensic accounting, but the course wasn’t nearly as colourful as the artist retreats or improv. nights her friends attended – not to her, at least. Rather, her degree was grey and overcast like a storm cloud, and if it were a person, it’d ...
Submitted to Contest #267
1. Nora wiped her hand, sticky with ice block, against the wooden fence which, to nobody’s surprise, would later be the culprit of the throbbing splinter in her finger.“Nora!” a voice rang out from the balcony above. It was her cousin – she’d taken the last cola Sunnyboy from Grandma’s freezer.She peered about then squeezed through the gap in the fence where a plank was missing, into Mean Lady’s overgrown backyard – there were spiderwebs on the shrubs, spiderwebs hanging mid-air, their owners big and black and ga...
Submitted to Contest #265
Trigger warning: mild gore.The apples were rotting on their branches, encircled by an aura of fruit flies. The buzz of the garden vibrated through Annette’s being, burrowing through her ears like termites, eating away at her insides as though they were wood – only she didn’t have any insides, and she was, in fact, wooden. Given her hollowness, she was propelled forward only by an innate knowing – a curious something that animated her wooden legs, ridden with termite holes, to rise and fall with a featherlike frailty. A gust of wind could hav...
I was watching Melancholia, watching a blue planet expand and consume the cinema screen. It was the end of the world, and all the while I was thinking of Isaac. Less out of melodrama, I hope, than out of boredom; the film was mesmerizingly dull. And yet I left the cinema with an odd sense of clarity: I’d hurt someone who genuinely cared about me. “What are the lasting effects?” he’d asked of my past relationship. I didn’t know, I said, but I’d surely see them triggered in a relationship (or situationship, in our case). And now the verdict is...
Submitted to Contest #261
You have long been my what-if, and here I sit in tears with a bottle half full and half empty of wine.“I don’t want to give you false hopes,” you said, finally giving me closure. You don’t want to be with me, and if you did, I probably wouldn’t want to be with you.It’s your lack of interest, I bet, that makes me want you. Your lack of interest, I bet, that makes me experience what I’ve labelled love – only, it isn’t love. It’s what I grew up with: it’s a craving for validation. And yet if you were to validate me, I’d probably lose interest.“...
Submitted to Contest #257
Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.— A Midsummer Night’s Dream “You were magnetic up there,” said Tatiana, starry-eyed and spellbound, as though the music and wine had entered her bones, the lyrics her heart. Her marrow and cartilage were alive with it, her tendons vibrating like guitar strings. She might have imagined the smile reach Jack’s eyes, the rouge in his cheeks, the lip-bite. She felt light, lighter than she had in a long time; she was dreaming, only she wasn’t.“Is that right?” said Jack, pulling up a stoo...
Submitted to Contest #256
Nora was never much of a musician. In fact, in eighth grade she’d received a D in music – partly due to her lack of talent, and partly due to her incessant talking. You have a lot of potential, all her teachers would say, and she wore it like a badge.But I suppose that isn’t relevant, so where were we? Nora was never much of a musician, so it was a peculiarity, albeit an endearing one, to find her onstage at an open mic night. She hadn’t anticipated the crowd, and amongst them her muse glistening like a pearl, lifting a bottle to his lips. W...
Submitted to Contest #252
We had Janine and Bill round yesterday, not that I wanted them in the house. I couldn’t tell John no, but what was he thinking? The last time we were on the verge of separating, he told me it was as though he and Janine had known each other all their lives. It’s not that I’m in love or anything, he’d said, not that I’d asked.John’s at work and so I’m writing in the kitchen. I don’t really want to sit at my desk in the bedroom – it throbs with last night, with the echo of John’s voice, and despite the tall windows, the sun on the floorboards,...
1I run my finger over the surface of an old dressing table—dust, silver thimble—and perch myself on a precariously wobbly stool. I stare into the mirror, into its wonky rendition of myself. It has a cloudy, greenish hue and its circumference is freckled with dark spots—a few of which are superimposed on my collarbone—and I’m unsettled by the ashen face that glares back, the purple beneath her eyes, the eeriness of her white dress. It’s the mirror. Even the sunlit bookshelves behind me have lost their glow, the grass has lost its green, and t...
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