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Weekly Contest #342
My son is an only child. My husband is an only child. My mother-in-law is an only child. I am not. I grew up as one of three girls, and our house was busy and loud. If you needed something upstairs and the person who could help you was downstairs, you just yelled for them until they answered back. We were a family of yellers. My husband didn't come from a family of yellers. In fact, his family was the opposite. They didn't talk much at all. At first, I was puzzled. How could anyone get anything done with any expedience if there wasn't the im...
Weekly Contest #339
Cece was often a lonely girl. She was holed up in a luxury apartment on the Upper West Side and wanted for nothing. But still, she was alone and lonely. Each and every day began with a cup of tea and the hope that somehow today might be different. Her life had been devoid of companionship for a while. Had it been a full year? On occasion, she would catch the Amazon delivery person and invite him or her into her apartment for a coffee or tea, and if the delivery person were extremely good looking or proved to be incredibly interesting, Cece w...
Weekly Contest #335
I tried to open my eyes, but sleep crusted them shut. Instinctively, I tried to raise my hand to my face to drag my index fingers through the crust, but there was a problem. My wrists were secured. In an attempt to sit up, I found my torso secured to a gurney or hospital bed or something. I tried to jar the crust loose by trying to blink with my eyes closed, raising my eyebrows, changing my facial expression. Tears of frustration, anger, and cold terror finally won out, lubricating my eyes and lids enough to dissolve the formed crust. With m...
Weekly Contest #334
With Mama, Papa, and Goldie dead, my life changed. I was in the care of Grandma Ursula and Grandpa Paddy. They didn't much care for the grand house on the estate, and truth be told, I didn't much care for it either. We had all the money from Mama, Papa, and Goldie's life insurance policies and all the money from the business—the empire that replaced me in their lives. "What should we do with the house," Grandma asked one evening while we sat on the back terrace, (or veranda, as Goldie liked to call it) of the expansive house. We looked out t...
Weekly Contest #331
I found it in a magazine. It would perhaps enliven the party, and if not, it would certainly draw interest. I clipped a few sprigs of rosemary, took the tops off a few marigolds, and carefully placed the vodka bottle inside the empty milk carton. I slowly filled the carton with water, pausing now and again to place the flowers and herbs in the channel between the bottle and the milk carton's thin waxy cardboard. Gently, gently, I placed the assembly in the freezer. In several hours' time, I would peel the milk carton away, and the vodka woul...
Weekly Contest #330
"Where did Tim go?" Mark asked."I think he wanted to put his leftovers in his car," I said.Everyone was home on break. We called and texted one another to get plans together for the evening. There was an old Italian restaurant that was known for having a duck-pin bowling alley in its basement. They were also known for having meatballs that were about a third of a pound apiece. The name of the game was to order spaghetti with the meatball and marinara and then smash the meatball or slice it or whatever. Everyone had a method for tackling the ...
Weekly Contest #329
The child's scrawl on a Christmas card—such a small, yet special thing. The malformed letters were squished and scrunched every which way in the cramped space beneath a canned greeting, drafted by some man or woman who spent the day coming up with, "Season's Greetings!" while watching the clock tick slowly toward the magical hour when the slog of coming up with fresh holiday greetings ended. This special card was reserved for the Head Elf himself. Santa. Saint Nick. Kris Kringle. Pere Noel. However a child referred to him, it was all the sam...
Weekly Contest #327
She rode into town on 25-year old mare, given to her on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday. Bess never was a rough and tumble kind of gal. She rode Sal everywhere the day the horse came into her possession, and Bess never seemed to mind that Sal went one speed--slow, with a slight limp. It turned out that if a horse lived long enough, there might be some hip dysplasia, or one leg might just be a little shorter than the other three. Bess eschewed the car, the bus, and she would have turned up her nose at the subway if she had lived in a l...
Weekly Contest #326
Margot bent over to pull her running shoes on. They were, perhaps, one of her best finds. Light weight, wide toe box, cushioned support in the heel. When she laced the shoes, she felt a poignant sense of achievement for having found these shoes in a sea of shoes upon shoes upon shoes. They weren't the first or last shoes she tried but somewhere in the middle. She knew as soon as she tried them they were perfect, but, still, she persisted in trying on more shoes before coming back around to settle on perfection. A woman could go a lifetime an...
Weekly Contest #325
Mother and I sat together on boulders on the edge of the field. We grew wheat this year, covering the land, a canvas of wheat for acres and acres, the golden chaff blowing gently in the breeze. From where we sat, it looked like sand shifting in a desert. The wind raced across the crops toward us, caressing our cheeks, kissing our foreheads, invading our nostrils with the slightly sweet scent of wheat and a mild undercurrent of decay. The sun warmed our scalps and faces, and I took a hat from the bag Mother had brought with her. Mother drew h...
Weekly Contest #323
"Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire…" the three sisters chanted in unison until Jasmine broke the flow with a sneeze that had her doubling over. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me. Fair is foul and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air," she said, lapsing into a cackle heavily laden with labored breathing and the sound of phlegm-filled lungs." "Jazz," Ariel said, "you need to get to an apothecary or a shaman or a wizard or someone for a breathing treatment." "Ariel's right," their oldest sister, Tiana, responded. ...
Weekly Contest #322
"Man, you're not digging down on the vibe," Levi said. "There's something missing. It's the vibe, you know? Can't you feel it?" Levi covered the head of the microphone and shook his head in exasperation. He did exasperation well with his rats' nest of naturally curly hair that he couldn't be bothered to brush or comb or style."Robbie, man, are you listening to me?" Levi said while snapping his fingers as if to bring him out of a trance."Dude, I don't know what 'digging down on the vibe' means. Like, I mean, what?" Robbie said. Robbie had rec...
Weekly Contest #321
Virgil was very, very tired. Each morning, he rolled over, groped for the button on the alarm clock, sat up in bed, stretched his arms toward the sky, and let out a yawn that did not sound like a lion's roar. The sounds that came from his mouth while he yawned were a moan. This moan was a lifetime's worth of dissatisfaction jettisoned each morning into the ether, and no one beyond Virgil would ever hear his unhappy braying. No one would ever rush to his side to offer to make things better, to make him better, to make his existence on this pl...
Weekly Contest #320
The Field TripI acknowledge now that it was not a very good idea. In fact, in light of events, I acknowledge that it was a very bad idea. When I was planning the field trip, though, it seemed like the perfect way to capture the curiosity and imaginations of the children. It seemed like a beautiful way to teach them the wonder of natural science in a way where they could be part of the spectacular nature of, well...nature.The PlansAll of the planning followed the usual procedure, involved completing the usual forms, and ended with the usual a...
Weekly Contest #319
Doing the right thing was sometimes the easiest thing but, often, though, the hardest thing. "If left untended, things invariably tend toward chaos," a professor explained in a biochemistry class. This professor was the essence of what happened when something was left untended."Class, look at my eyes," he said. "Can you see this cataract on my left eye? Look at my arms. Can you see the misshapen veins protruding from my forearms?" He wore an unfortunately out of date golf shirt, but proved his point by turning his forearms toward the class t...
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