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Weekly Contest #380
When Reid Van Buren turned onto the street where he had grown up, he was surprised by how small everything looked. The houses were closer together than he remembered, their porches barely wide enough for two chairs, the narrow lawns interrupted by chain-link fences and crooked concrete paths. Newark had changed in 32 years. A corner grocery had become a church. The laundromat where his mother once sent him with quarters was boarded up. But the brick apartment building at the end of the block was still there, its windows covered with plywood,...
The first photograph emerged from the developer showing a birthday party that had never taken place. Dr. Ada Wetherell recognized the kitchen, the yellow wallpaper, and the crooked paper crown on the little boy's head. The boy was her brother, Simon, who had died at six. In the photograph he was turning seven, surrounded by balloons and smiling relatives. Ada stood beside him, nine years old, holding a chocolate cake with seven candles. Simon had died three months before his seventh birthday. Ada stared at the print until the chemicals began...
Chance Van Alstyne had not seen his sister in 11 years, but he knew the sound of her car as it approached. Jennifer drove the same way she had at 17, taking corners too quickly and braking only when the road forced her to. The tires hissed across the wet gravel outside their father's house, and Chance watched from the kitchen window as she climbed out. She stood looking at the white clapboard siding, the dark windows, the enormous maple leaning toward the porch. Beyond the trees, Skaneateles Lake was a gray strip beneath a gray November sky....
The stars disappeared somewhere south of Scott City. Donald “Dutch” Waterman did not notice immediately. There was no reason he should have. He had driven US-83 enough times that most of western Kansas had become something he experienced without consciously seeing. Highway. Fields. Grain elevators. Center pivots. Farmhouses separated by miles of nothing. Towns announced by lights long before you reached them and forgotten almost as quickly after you left. At 1:47am, Dutch was mostly thinking about coffee. His thermos was empty. Garden City w...
Isabelle Van Doren found the photograph inside a box of Christmas ornaments, beneath a cracked ceramic angel and a tangle of lights that had not worked since the children were small. The picture showed a church she recognized, a polished wooden casket, and a cluster of mourners standing beneath an enormous stained-glass window. At the front of the church lay a girl in a white dress. Her hands were folded over her waist. Her hair was dark, her face pale, and there was a small crescent-shaped scar just above her left eyebrow. Isabelle touched ...
Weekly Contest #379
The truck had been following her for 19 miles, although its driver had died six weeks earlier and the wreck was locked behind a chain-link fence. At first, the woman behind the wheel of the state inspection sedan thought the headlights belonged to an impatient contractor. The truck stayed two car lengths behind her through the orange barrels north of Columbus, where traffic had been narrowed to a single lane. Its grille was an old white Mack, its windshield a sheet of darkness. She recognized the crushed passenger-side door and the crooked r...
The thing in the basement learned to breathe before it learned to speak. At first, Derek Hollowell mistook the sound for the ventilation fan, an irregular wet dragging noise beneath the floorboards of the rented house outside Casper. He had been awake for three days, his jaw hurt from grinding his teeth, and the two men working with him had begun arguing about money neither of them had earned. Strange noises were not unusual in a place where nothing had been repaired since the previous century. He kicked the basement door and told whatever w...
The first thing Wesley Maddox found in his mother's house was a cassette tape with his name on it. The second was a receipt for a funeral that had never happened. The receipt lay beneath a stack of appliance manuals in the kitchen drawer, folded twice, yellow at the creases. It listed a burial plot, a child's casket, and an engraved marker, all paid for in cash in October 1997. Under NAME OF DECEASED someone had typed WESLEY MADDOX. The date of birth was his. The date of death was October 19, the night his best friend, Spencer Ashford, had k...
By the time the ambulance disappeared around the corner, Andrew Whitcomb had begun bargaining with things he did not believe in. He made the bargains silently because his wife was beside him in the emergency department, and because their daughter was awake and frightened enough without hearing her father negotiate with the dark. An hour later, when the doctors said the immediate danger had passed, he told his wife he was going home. Their two younger children were with a neighbor who needed to leave for work before dawn, and the dogs had bee...
The first thing I recognized was the music. Not the room, not the smell of salt and old wood, not the pressure around my wrists. The music. Three soft notes fell through the dark, patient as water finding a crack in stone. My husband used to play them when he couldn't sleep. He would sit at the upright piano in our apartment and let the opening of Beethoven's fourteenth sonata move through the walls until I came to stand behind him. He called it a piece about restraint. I called it the song that meant he was sad. Eleven years after he disapp...
Weekly Contest #378
CW: Violence, blood, murder The first thing the mirror showed Donny Baird was his daughter in a wedding dress. The second was a man burning alive. He bought it on a Saturday because he was tired of seeing himself in the dark windows of an empty house. The estate sale occupied a brick Victorian on the far side of town, the kind with an iron fence and a porch that sagged in the middle. He had come for a dresser. Instead, he found a tall walnut mirror leaning against a wall in the basement. Its frame was carved with flowers whose petals looked...
I learned to speak by listening to a man beg for his life. He called me a bear at first. Then a wolf. When I opened my mouth and gave back his own voice, he stopped naming things and began praying. I have worn his face for 17 years, though I remember only fragments of the afternoon I found him beside the creek. My territory lies in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, beyond the last maintained road and a logging camp abandoned after the company went bankrupt. I know every spring and den, every trail where people walk believing they are alone...
CW: Injury, death, child neglect, infant loss At 12:04am, the pantry door opened by itself. Franklin Cobb watched it from the kitchen table, where he had been repairing a wooden toy truck for his grandson. The latch clicked. The door swung inward six inches and stopped. He waited for the furnace to start, for a draft to explain the movement, but the house was silent. He got up and closed it. The latch caught with a clean metallic snap. Franklin had been a carpenter for 47 years. He knew doors. He knew how a house shifted in winter, how damp...
The bride died at 8:14pm, between the father-daughter dance and the cutting of the cake. At least that was what the groom told everyone. The photographer's camera recorded 8:11pm. The bandleader's watch said 8:19pm. Later, when the police collected the phones, every recording of the collapse began at a different time. It was raining when Delia Wren entered the ballroom. Rain in November was nothing unusual in the mountains of western North Carolina, but the windows were black with it, and the old hotel's gutters poured as if the roof were dr...
The first thing you ought to know is that I did not choose you. People find that difficult to believe. They want a reason. They want to hear that they cut me off in traffic, or laughed at my shoes, or looked like a woman who once broke my heart. They want to believe the world is a machine and every terrible thing that happens is the result of somebody putting a hand in the wrong place. I don't blame them. A reason would make this easier. I was eating a peach when I saw you. That is how ordinary it was. The peach came from a roadside stand ou...
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