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Weekly Contest #300
Picture this. You’re riding shotgun, speeding past kilometres of arid land, then dominoes of lemon trees, beds of sunflowers. There are remnants of walls, grey-white bricks wrapped with graffiti, as small as Monopoly houses beneath an infinite blue sky. There’s wind in your hair, sunshine on the dashboard and on your thighs. You’re Nora, and you’re leaving Murcia behind.Ignacio glanced over at her, eyes golden as resin behind his sunglasses, amber lenses projecting a sunshine scar across his cheek. Nora had insisted on paying him, but he’d B...
Weekly Contest #299
Decorum, often, is a two-way street; or, better yet, it’s an entire city blueprint and is contingent on all of us. But there’s a world in which things are upside down, where cars fly and tenants, clinging to their curtains, are tugged from their windows by gravity (fine, that might be an exaggeration – but only in the literal sense). And in that world, decorum is a vacuous thing in its unrequitedness. It is demanded by some and performed by many – sometimes, even, when one spits in your face (quite literally this time). “Had you not looked a...
Weekly Contest #296
Have you ever felt like an octopus in a garage? What, haven’t you heard that one before?“Why an octopus in a garage?”“Why not?”One might think this were a conversation born of disinhibited inebriety, but if we, dear readers, take a closer look, we’ll find that our protagonists’ beer bottles and half-torn labels bear the wide, caricaturesque eyes of 0.0%. (Four eyes, in fact, if we puzzle-piece the poor shreds back together). Four eyes. They called him that at school, Joaquín. Never quite fit in. Went to therapy for it, actually. How could h...
Weekly Contest #292
I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, until I hear my landlord’s footsteps on the stairs, hear him call my name. And for a moment he’ll take centre stage, though this is not the real story but its backdrop.—My landlord always keeps his door ajar so I must greet him by the stairwell.—“How about wine and castañas tonight?” he texts.—“Call me later,” he reads aloud. He reads my tank top. He reads my breasts.—My landlord needs me downstairs, needs help in the garage.—My landlord greets me in the kitchen, in his dressing gown, leans over me ...
Weekly Contest #290
Often, I’m a rose or a sonnet or a bottle of wine – red as the blood that rushes to one’s cheeks, red as the lipstick one reapplies, lips magnified in a compact mirror like two twists of red liquorice. What am I?Sweet, I am. The object of your affection. Sugar plum, honey, sweetie pie, pumpkin. I’m a mouthful. Sometimes I slide off your tongue like one’s native language. Sometimes I catch in your throat like a loose seam on a branch.Obnoxious, I’ve been called. As loud as a megaphone. Other times, as quiet as string and paper cups. Sometimes...
Weekly Contest #288
Nobody wants to read the story of a cynic, or so I’ve heard. Not that I am one – I’m too old to be cynical (at least today, who knows what I’ll say tomorrow?). I’m too old to don cynicism like a beret, a scarf, to paint my nails black with it, to smoke it like a cigarette and complain the world is rotting, anyway. What’s another pair of black lungs when the sky’s been smoking chimneys? when factories are stuffed like pipes? Fair point, but I think I prefer my lungs pink. And yet I’m equally too old for hopeless romanticism – at least today, ...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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 ...
Weekly 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 ...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
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