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Weekly Contest #352
THE COLOUR OF MOURNING Jenna stood in the rain on the cliff path above Portreath. It was a soft, persistent rain, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air, soaking everything by sheer persistence. It pearled on the wax of her old jacket and dripped from the brim of her hat, merging with the salt spray that gusted up from the churning bay below. She’d promised her grandfather she’d come. He’d been dead three months, but a promise to a Cornish miner, she’d learned, outlived the man. “Take it back,” he’d whispered, his voice grave...
Weekly Contest #337
The static had a geography. Jonah learned this during his first endless night at Relay Station KHAD, perched on a lichen-crusted rock in the Bering Sea. It wasn’t just white noise. There were latitudes in it: the low, rolling hiss of the southern doldrums; the crisp, crackling ridges of Arctic interference; and, sometimes, a deep, frictionless hum from a place the equipment couldn’t name. His job was to monitor it all. To log the anomalies. To be the human ear in a shack that machinery maintained, for a government agency that had, by all app...
Weekly Contest #336
The call came at 3:03 a.m., the way calls about dead sons do. It wasn’t the police. It was the owner of The Lookout, a beach bar in Sennen Cove, a woman named Morwenna, her voice frayed by salt and wind. “Mr. Hayes? I’m so sorry. It’s about Jamie. You’d better come.” Alistair Hayes drove the five and a half hours from Hedgerley, in Buckinghamshire, to the toe of Cornwall as the M4 and then the A30 unspooled, green and grey. He didn’t listen to the radio. He replayed the last conversation, three weeks prior. Jamie’s voice, bleary and distant...
By the time Martin Treloar turned into Lamorna View, the light had thinned to a dull rinse, as if the day had been used up. The gulls were already arguing on the rooftops. Somewhere below the street, unseen, the sea was moving. He passed Number 12 - his house - and looked, as he always did, for the space. It wasn’t marked. No sign. No dropped kerb. Just a stretch of worn tarmac between a sycamore and a stone wall where the road widened enough for one car to sit without blocking the rest. Martin had parked there for fourteen years. His father...
Weekly Contest #335
CW: Grief, mental health The plan was a beautiful, violent thing.It lived in Commander Thomas Thorne’s bones, a symphony of timed explosions. T-Minus 10 seconds. Main engine start. T-Minus 6. Four. Three. Two. One. Solid rocket booster ignition. Liftoff. We have liftoff.The memory wasn’t a memory; it was a physical imprint. The tremor began as a deep, subsonic growl, the sound of the planet objecting. Then the thrust, a giant’s hand pinning him to the seat, vision blurring, chest compressing. The roar wasn’t a sound you heard; it was a thing...
The plan was flawless: a four-day "Un-New Year's" cruise in the Caribbean, returning on the 30th. They'd miss the post-Christmas crash, dodge the forced cheer of January 1st, and re-enter reality as if stepping from a time machine. Perfection. The plan ended at 3:17 PM on December 27th with a sound like God tearing a sheet of steel. The S.S. Resplendent, a floating city of joy, gave a violent, groaning shudder. Every light died. The artificial breeze in the atrium vanished, replaced by stifling, vacuum-sealed heat. The floor tilted, not the ...
Weekly Contest #334
The first thing the woods took from Sylas Renn was his wedding ring. Not its physical form - the platinum band remained on his finger - but the sound of it. The faint, definitive click it made against his ceramic coffee mug each morning, a tiny percussion of habit and home. He’d been listening to the playback from his overnight microphones in Halvarth Wood when he heard it: that familiar click, perfectly rendered, nestled between the hoot of a tawny owl and the rustle of a fox. The owl and fox had been outside his tent. The mug and the ring ...
Weekly Contest #333
Julian Blake’s new amuse-bouche was called “Trevethan Tonic,” a clear, fragrant broth he presented as his rediscovery of a lost Victorian coastal recipe. To the forty-three diners in his modernist Cornish restaurant, Morlanow, it tasted of the sea and of genius. To their nervous systems, it delivered a rare, paralytic neurotoxin. The first sign was a dropped spoon, ringing like a funeral bell against china. Then a choked gasp. At Table Three, a woman clawed at her throat as if the air had solidified. Her husband’s shout was a fracture in the...
What the Harbour Held ‘For the listener who hears the stories in the silence between the waves.’ Martha came to Mousehole in December because the voices in London had become too loud. She didn't hear them with her ears, but in the back of her mind: the clanging anxiety of the city, the whispered disappointments in crowded cafes, the sour hum of loneliness in her own flat. She craved silence. But in Mousehole, she found a different kind of noise. It wasn't audible. It was a pressure, a deep, resonant hum of absence, held in the white painted...
Weekly Contest #332
Jenna stood in the rain on the cliff path above Portreath. It was a soft, persistent rain, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air, soaking everything by sheer persistence. It pearled on the wax of her old jacket and dripped from the brim of her hat, merging with the salt spray that gusted up from the churning bay below. She’d promised her grandfather she’d come. He’d been dead three months, but a promise to a Cornish miner, she’d learned, outlived the man.“Take it back,” he’d whispered, his voice gravel from a lifetime of engi...
The greatest storm in living memory had passed, and in it’s wake, Lowenna held only silence and a ruined tape. As Soundkeeper of Porthmorven, her entire purpose was to bind the village’s history to spools of reel-to-reel tape - its’ joys, its’ losses, and most of all, it’s’ storms. The official record of last night’s terror was a screech of distorted noise. But on a secondary reel, almost by accident, she had captured something else entirely: the fragile, hidden sounds of her community trying not to break.She was a woman built for the nuance...
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