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Weekly Contest #377
Listen to the reed and the tale it tells, how it sings of separation. Ever since they cut me from the reed bed, my wail has caused men and women to weep. - Rumi It all started with Enkidu. Trouble usually did. The mean-tempered water buffalo was always getting into fights, and I had to keep an eye on him. I had insisted on naming him after the wild, savage beast-man from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and he lived up to his name. As soon as I noticed Enkidu and another male staring each other down, I dropped my flute and ran to separate them. By th...
Weekly Contest #357
Police chief Conrad Cooper looked up from his desk at the young woman who entered his office, pushing a stroller. “Hey, chief. Remember me?” She did look familiar, though he couldn’t place her. She was probably in her mid-twenties and had that exhausted, half-put-together look of a young mother. Her blonde hair was up in a messy bun and she wore a tank top and sweat pants. A curly-haired toddler sat in the stroller, clutching a stuffed giraffe and looking at Cooper with big brown eyes. He stood up to shake her hand. “We’ve met before, haven’...
Weekly Contest #329
The trick is not to think. Keep your mind occupied with what's in front of you - fill the pot, turn on the stove, watch the water boil, open the package, dump the noodles in - and you can forget there’s anything unusual about today. Go through your after-work routine like you do every day. Don’t look at the calendar. Don’t look at that one painting on the wall. Keep breathing. Cello music leaks up from the linoleum floor. You’ve never met your downstairs neighbor, but they practice diligently at seven o’clock every day. This is all you know ...
Weekly Contest #272
Miriam stepped on the gas and screamed as another wave of pain ripped across her abdomen. She was running out of time. “Faster,” she urged her vehicle. "Faster." Anxiously she scanned the horizon ahead: an unbroken line of red sand that faded into the sky in a rusty haze. She glanced at the compass, then at the rearview mirror. Behind the cloud of dust her own desert rig was kicking up, the much larger dust cloud that followed her had gotten bigger. They were gaining on her. She grabbed the radio, almost dropping it before securing it in h...
Weekly Contest #95
“We’ve narrowed it down to two options,” says my mother, beaming as though she’s prepared some delightful treat for me, “but we wanted you to have the final say.” “Well, that’s very considerate,” I say before I can stop myself. “I don’t get to choose whether I’m getting married, but at least I get to choose what to wear as I’m led to my death.” “Don’t be dramatic, Ziggy,” says my mother with a reprimanding frown. “A wedding is not a death sentence. It’s the happiest day of your life. Besides, you’re going to be a princess. It’s every girl’s ...
Weekly Contest #92
Rand walked the streets wrapped in a cloak of darkness. Beneath his hood, shadows pooled in the hard creases at the corners of his mouth. He wore no metal, nothing that could so much as glimmer and give him away. His footsteps fell so silently, he might have been a wraith made of darkness itself. Yet the ever-present pain that gnawed at his leg reminded him that he was very much flesh and bone. The streets he patrolled tonight were as black as they were quiet. Above him, the sky was shrouded in thick darkness. Only the oldest people in the ...
Weekly Contest #77
He had thought they would be safe here. He had thought they had come far enough. But as the snowflakes swirled down around him, melting on the hot sand and covering the tent in a white shroud, Vaziri knew he had been wrong. There was no safe haven for their kind, nowhere on earth they could hide where she wouldn’t find them. Deep in his heart, he admitted, he had always known this. Even accepted it. Still, he couldn’t help but wish for more time. Tarya wasn’t ready yet. Not ready for the perils of the journey that awaited her, not ready for ...
Weekly Contest #68
It had been twenty-four years since she’d seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. Gray and drab and falling apart, like everything else in this god-forsaken town. Not a surprise, she thought, given how the people of Gull Harbour felt about change. Flickering neon letters above the door blazed brokenly into the night: Th Pike and Pe ican. Hazel took a deep breath and released it slowly. She was here for one purpose, and one purpose alone: find Aurora and bring her home. But as she stood before the door to the bar, an unexpected wave...
Weekly Contest #39
The sun had just gone down, and Simon was on the beach, making a sandcastle. A salty breeze came in from the water, and he could hear seagulls in the distance. The sandcastle was in the shape of a circle, and had lots of windows he’d poked in with this finger. There was no moat, but in the middle there was a space in which he’d dug a lake and filled it with water. He was trying to model the castle after one he’d seen in a dream, but it was hard to remember the details. The quiet of the evening was nice. He could listen to the sound of the wa...
Shortlisted for Weekly Contest #26 ⭐️
He wakes up in an empty bed. A pang of hollowness stabs him. It will take a long time before he’s used to this, the raw ache of missing. It’s a familiar feeling. It feels like losing a limb. For a minute he lies there, crushed by the weight of a thousand empty mornings stretching out before him. He doesn’t want to get out of bed, to face the loneliness of the future that yawns like a gaping mouth. How can he bring himself to move forward into a world without her? He will not think of the future. Not yet. Today is for remembering. He forces h...
Weekly Contest #19
The first time he saw her, she couldn’t have been more than nine years old. Even with her horns, she didn’t even reach his shoulder. The old shopkeeper felt a strange fascination with her the moment he saw her, standing outside his shop, half-hidden beside the door. He watched her from behind the counter as he sanded a wooden cylinder, the beginning of what would become a magdal drum, and waited while she gathered her courage. He hoped she would come in. The shop was too quiet for his liking. She was unlike any infernabeast he’d ever seen – ...
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