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Weekly 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.“...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly Contest #251
In my elsewhere does it also rain blood?Is this my freedom or my confinement?This is not a story, not really, just the writer’s attempt to make sense of the three dead birds she’s seen this past week, amongst other signs (or trivialities). I’ve Googled it, of course. What does it mean to see dead birds everywhere?The first bird was a chick, shrivelled up on the sunny pavement by the bus station; the second squished in the middle of the road, guts like minced meat; and the third splattered across a zebra crossing.This gullible writer, yours t...
Weekly Contest #249
It’s funny how the world works – or, better yet, doesn’t. Had Alejandro not bumped into Frida, had their shoulders not collided, then maybe, just maybe, that handrail mightn’t have impaled her like rotisserie chicken, or in her words, like a matador’s blade through a bull. On a rainy day, September 17th—coincidentally, the narrator’s birthday—Frida and Alejandro boarded the bus that would change everything.“I could be a flea,” she said, “or headlice.”“Just to be with me?”“Claro, and you’d carry me around in your clothing, or on your scalp.”F...
Weekly Contest #248
Reality wasn’t real when she did it; it was cold and empty. People don’t understand that, though, do they? Reality wasn’t real when she did it; it was a phantom of sorts, absurd in its stubbornness like a little boy declaring himself to be a doctor. Why? Because your father’s white dress shirt reaches your knees? And where’d you get that stethoscope? Did Daddy give it to you?Reality wasn’t real when Rachel did it. The knife, sure, it felt tangible, but this too was just another absurdity. She’d adjusted her grip on the handle, laughing at th...
Weekly Contest #247
For as long as I can remember, I’ve not been allowed beyond the fig trees. Heck, I’ve not been allowed around them. Every harvesting season, I watch our people pluck the big, purple beads all the way from my window. Dad says I’ve called them that ever since my first vision. I was six when it happened, and it was fig-induced. Mary says my eyes turn purple when I eat them. Like twinkling gemstones, she says. I wouldn’t know. Dad doesn’t allow mirrors in the prophecy room. Something about light refraction. Not that I’d be able to see myself, an...
15th April, 2024Monday08:30 a.m.How presumptuous of me to think the recesses of the human heart is unexplored territory! How presumptuous to think my experiences are unique! But I did, I do, sometimes. I’m a coloniser declaring terra nullius where generations of feet have trodden before – culture, customs, stories.We’re all a bit like Lu Xun’s Ah Q or Voltaire’s Candide, our ignorance a child’s newspaper hat—roll it up and you’ve got a telescope! —as we frolic about wreaking havoc with a toothless grin, adult teeth yet to grow in. Want to pl...
Weekly Contest #239
To gawk, to ogle, to stare; there is more to looking than meets the eye, hence our nuanced language which allows for distinctions. Now, he wasn’t merely looking at me, but leering. He licked me up and down like an ice lolly, and every time I glanced up from my novel, or from the window and the rolling hills, those cloudy eyes were on me, something was rumbling, and lightning was bound to strike.I’d later come to find that his name was Jose Luis and that his grip was uncomfortably warm.Jose Luis looked to be in his late fifties, twice my age,...
Weekly Contest #236
My dearest Nineteen, There’s a boardgame on my shelf gathering dust. Last year, I lugged it up and down the French Riviera in my suitcase—squeezed between summer dresses, Daisy Dukes and dreams—and finally, here, to Alicante. I’ve opened it once to read the instructions; you need at least three players, and that’s two too many. And yet it strikes even me as peculiar. Why did I buy it? knowing that I have nobody with whom to play. I must have dreamt something up that day, for it’s never the coat on display that we buy, but the self we imagi...
Weekly Contest #235
She hadn’t meant to kiss her, hadn’t meant to make her cry, and she very well hadn’t meant to leave without saying goodbye, but the train—an hour late—was pulling into the station, and if Bella was any good at anything, it was running away. “It’s a cliché but are you running to or from something?” asked Amelie. They’d met a half hour ago, both affected by delays, and now sat on cold tiles just outside the news agency, Bella’s legs around a small backpack, Amelie’s propped up on a green 80L rucksack as though it were a footrest. “I don’t know...
Weekly Contest #231
Hope is not big, momentous, grand; it is not a plumed picture hat, not a coat, not a bag. It is as modest as the boring, old underwear beneath all that glamour, the underwear we somehow manage to change (almost) every day, despite being glued to our beds, losing lovers and friends, and despite unemployment. Margaret rolled over and turned off her alarm, picking out a painful wedgie. She was wearing Tuesday’s pair of underwear for the second consecutive day, one of the six pairs her ex-mother-in-law had sent her for Christmas (Monday was miss...
Weekly Contest #223
His sister’s hand-me-downs hung from his small frame like… a curtain? The halls were quiet, save for a distant cough, the turn of a page, and the click clack of a keyboard. Nora dried her hands on her trousers, and re-entered the warm embrace of the library, its warm lights, and green carpeting. She sat down at her laptop and scanned the room, the hunched shoulders, the black, brown and blonde heads lowered over books. And there on the red couch lay Chloe, eyes closed and legs outstretched, balancing her laptop like breakfast in bed. She wa...
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