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Weekly Contest #367
At 4:07 in the morning, Kelsey Vane had two hours and 53 minutes left before she never had to see Mason Reed again. Not that she was counting. She was absolutely counting. Kelsey lived in Casey, Illinois, and had spent nearly four years making the drive north to Urbana for 12 hour night shifts at Carle Foundation Hospital. She hated the drive. She hated nights. She hated hospital food, hospital coffee, hospital politics, and, increasingly, hospital patients. At seven that morning, she would clock out for the last time. Monday, she started at...
Weekly Contest #368
Todd Landry believed rollerblading was making a comeback largely because Todd Landry had started rollerblading again. He was 39, six feet tall if he stood correctly, and an oil and gas equipment salesman who had cleared two hundred thousand dollars the previous year and mentioned that fact whenever conversations wandered anywhere near money, careers, taxes, houses, trucks, restaurants, vacations, education, or people he considered lazy. Todd lived outside Abbeville, Louisiana, where August mornings were already hot enough to make breathing f...
CW: Substance abuse, self-harm Raymond Givens had been drunk for most of the last 27 years, which meant he knew the difference between withdrawal and dying. Doctors did not seem to understand that. They saw the drinking first. Everything else came second. Ray knew what withdrawal felt like. He knew the shaking, the sweating, the nausea, the irritability, the strange crawling sensation under the skin, the insomnia, the pulse pounding in his throat. He knew the fear that arrived when his body realized the alcohol was gone and decided to punis...
Daniel Frost hated MRI machines before he had ever been inside one. It was not claustrophobia. At least that was what he told his wife when she asked why he had spent three days complaining about a test that involved lying down for 45 minutes. Daniel was 48 years old, the principal of a high school outside Burlington, Vermont, and had spent 26 years working with teenagers. He had broken up fights, talked suicidal students off metaphorical ledges, dealt with furious parents, fired employees, testified at school board meetings, and once spent ...
Victoria “Tori” Langley knew something was wrong with the IV because the nurse said, “Oh, shit.” Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just two words spoken under her breath as she looked at the nearly empty bag hanging above Tori’s bed. Tori opened her eyes. “What?” The nurse did not answer. “What did you just say?” “Nothing.” “You said ‘oh, shit.’” The nurse reached for the IV pump. Tori grabbed her wrist. “What is wrong?” “Mrs. Langley, let go of me.” “What did you give me?” Another nurse entered the room carrying a plastic cup of ice. “What’s go...
Walter Boone had been using the same email address since 1997. He saw no reason to change it. That seemed to bother people. His accountant had mentioned it. His niece had mentioned it. A woman he briefly dated after his divorce had laughed so hard when he gave it to her that Walter almost left the restaurant. Even his bank had started suggesting he “update” his contact information, as though an email address could expire from embarrassment. But it still worked. That was the part nobody seemed to understand. walterboone57@aol.com received ema...
Weekly Contest #366
Nathan Cross first moved the spoon six inches without touching it. He stared at it for a long time afterward. Not because he thought he had done it. Because he knew he had not. The spoon had been sitting on the tray beside his hospital bed in New Hampshire, next to a cup of coffee he had already decided was too cold to drink. Nathan had been looking at the television, half listening to a nurse explain that his bowel surgery had gone well and that he would probably be there another four or five days, when he felt a sudden pressure behind his ...
I should have known better. Not about the West Virginia coal mine. Not about the surgery. Not even about the Dilaudid. I should have known better than to answer the old woman. “You can see me, can’t you?” I opened my eyes. At least I thought I did. The hospital room looked exactly the same as it had before I fell asleep. Same television bolted to the wall. Same beige curtain hanging between my bed and the empty one beside it. Same glowing monitor throwing numbers into the darkness. Same plastic pitcher of water on the tray table that had ...
Weekly Contest #365
When Amos Vick died, the red dirt under his fingernails was the only part of the farm he took with him. The rest went to his sons. That was what everyone in Weller, Oklahoma, believed until the will was read in the back room of Daugherty Funeral Home on an afternoon so hot the flies had gone quiet against the windows. Clive Vick sat in his father’s church suit, though it pinched under the arms and smelled faintly of mothballs. Across from him, his younger brother, Ellis, wore clean jeans and a white shirt without a tie. Ellis had always bee...
Weekly Contest #364
The first time the numbers failed, Ethan Brooks assumed he had made a mistake. Surveyors were taught to distrust themselves before they distrusted the land. A loose tripod. A prism pole leaning a fraction of a degree. A coordinate entered incorrectly. The mistakes were always human because the earth, for all its faults, did not quietly rearrange itself overnight. Ethan had spent 23 years proving exactly that. At 46, he worked as a cadastral surveyor for the Bureau of Land Management outside Moab, Utah. His days were divided between satellit...
The first letter fell out of the chart on a rainy Thursday in October. Thomas Avery had owned the navigation chart for nearly 20 years. Folded inside a flat oak drawer in his workshop, it was one of dozens he had collected after retiring from the Coast Guard. Most had long since been replaced by electronic navigation, but Thomas liked paper charts for the same reason he liked mechanical clocks and brass compasses. They aged honestly. Every crease, stain, and penciled correction reflected the hands of someone who had depended on them. The cha...
Caleb Dunn found the first open gate before daylight. The chain hung from the post as though someone had taken the time to remove it carefully. It had not been cut. The latch was not broken. Nothing about the gate suggested panic, weather, or an animal forcing its way through. Someone had lifted the chain, pulled the gate open, and left it that way. Caleb stopped the truck and let the engine idle. The headlights reached across the snow and caught the wire fence disappearing toward the foothills. Beyond it, shapes moved slowly through the dar...
Weekly Contest #363
At 4:17 every morning, Declan Moriarty walked the harbor. Rain, snow, wind, heat. None of it mattered. Weather changed. People complained. Routines endured. He left his apartment in Dorchester at 3:41, drove the same route through South Boston, parked beneath the same dead streetlight near the edge of the Seaport, and began walking at exactly 4:17. He did not choose the time because of superstition. Declan did not believe in luck, curses, signs, or divine intervention. He chose 4:17 because the first sanitation trucks reached the waterfront ...
Weekly Contest #362
I reckon folks with full bellies think food is about flavor. Fancy words like "notes" and "mouthfeel" and "presentation." They swirl wine around in a glass, close their eyes, nod real slow like they're decipherin’ the meaning of life from fermented grapes. They spend forty bucks on a steak no bigger than the palm of my hand, then tell each other how the chef "elevated" the experience. Hell, where I come from, if somebody elevates your supper, it's because they dropped it on the floor and had to pick it back up. I ain't never understood peop...
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