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Weekly Contest #289
"The room is unfamiliar. I don't know how I got here. I smell Steve Breck." Two truths and a lie. I knew the lie. We all knew the lie. Steve Breck had been dead for three years. There was no way anyone could smell Steve Breck. Steve was this soul who would invite everyone to dinner. He'd blindfold us, seat us next to someone, and then on the other side of us would be one of his household staff who would cut our food and feed it to us. We would never be seated near anyone we already knew. We were tasked with eating a delicious meal that we co...
"My mother. She is the best. If she could still perform all the high kicks and jumps of her former cheerleader self, I'm sure she would not be a 50-something fighting old lady aches and pains like a bum hip, lumbago, or sciatica. She would probably have ACL and meniscus ailments, but not the other stuff." I flipped to the slide of my mother in the early 1980s, and could that girl jump. The next photo that floated onto the slide was my mother cheering in college. The photographer caught her mid-air, mid-jump, and I was consumed in this this e...
Weekly Contest #288
The flies were flying lower, and the deer flies were flying lower, too. And they were biting. The air was heavy with humidity portending some serious weather. I always loved it in the hours before a storm. The silver maple leaves rustled in the wind enough to see their silvery undersides. Once the silver made its appearance, it was only a matter of time before the thunder, lightning, maybe straight line winds, would kick into gear. The damned flies. Unlike mosquitoes, flies' bites didn't itch--they just hurt. We sold our house and moved in w...
"Have you ever done biofeedback before?" asked the medical assistant. "No. But I have this trick that I do when I go to the doctor and they're taking my blood pressure," I answered. "Really? What do you do?" she asked. "I picture myself lying like a starfish on a king-sized mattress in a hotel room, and there's a sliding glass door that's open. There are sheer curtains, and a gentle breeze gives a light sway to them. The breeze coming in is warm, and I feel the breeze, but just barely. Outside, I hear the wind in the trees and the sounds of ...
Weekly Contest #287
Phil and Bob had been best friends in high school. Phil married Bob's sister. Both men grew up to have three children. Phil moved to Texas and worked for an oil company after he did his stint in the Army. Bob went to college, then went into the Army for two years. That's just what people did back then--they served their country. It was after Korea, but before Vietnam. Neither Phil nor Bob saw any action besides the fights they got into with the other GIs who would make the mistake of getting into petty scraps with them. Bob continued to live...
That fuck. I sat across from him, watched him over-salt everything on his plate. Observed him tucking a napkin, bib-style, into the collar of his button down. We each had Target bags filled with things we both wanted returned to us from each other's apartments. I looked in the bag he handed me, thinking it would contain my heart, and found the Rolling Stones CD box set. I didn't even have a CD player, but he was NOT keeping the Stones. He could listen to the radio or whatever. He ruined this restaurant for me forever. I would never be able t...
Shortlisted for Weekly Contest #286 ⭐️
"Good morning, class. Welcome to your Philosophy 101 final exam. You were asked to bring only a pen or pencil. If you have brought anything additional, you are excused from the exam, and will receive an email with an assignment for not being able to follow instructions. Also, the best you will be able to score on the assignment is a 'C.'" There were three or four students who left the room. They had brought bottles of water, cups of coffee, and one person had brought a timer. The professor circled their names on the class roster, then calmly...
Weekly Contest #285
"Good morning," my mother answered the phone. She always answered the phone with the appropriate greeting for the day. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. She answered every single phone call. My parents didn't have caller ID. They did have call waiting, but no caller ID. Sometimes my dad answered the call, too, on one of the extensions in the house, and his greetings usually sounded like, "Jello." Where my mother's greeting sounded like Glinda the Good Witch, my father's greeting sounded like a bridge troll. Every call involving a c...
Weekly Contest #283
"Jesus, Joseph, and Mary," she muttered as she stood in front of the ticket agent on Christmas Eve morning. Meredith knew she was tempting the fates, but it couldn't be helped. Her youngest daughter didn't get home from her most recent gymnastics meet until late the night before, with an injury to boot. "I'm sorry, ma'am. With this flight being delayed, there's no way you're going to be able to make your connection in Chicago," the ticket agent said, wildly tapping the keys on her computer." "Are you absolutely sure? Can you put us on any ot...
Weekly Contest #282
"Vi? I'm sorry," my dad said. I knew why he was calling as soon as I saw his name come up on my caller ID. "What did I do?" he asked. "Well, Dad, you called me an embarrassment in front of our family and everyone else at Maggie's for Thanksgiving," I said acidly, and I knew I didn't sound forgiving or like someone accepting an apology because I didn't want to accept the apology. "Why would I say that?" he asked. "Because you were being a petulant child who didn't get his way," I responded flatly. "Why didn't I get my way?" And this was the h...
Weekly Contest #281
The house was lit up inside and out. A ten foot tall Santa stood moored to the front yard, inflated and lit up from within. He was surrounded by a ring of 24-inch wooden elves, each one raising both arms skyward, as if they were worshiping this guy who wore a strange red getup, trimmed out in white fur, who stole into people's homes in the dead of night. He must have been in cahoots with the man who drove the ice cream truck in the summer or some creepy guy in a white panel van who cased neighborhoods for unsuspecting children. How could thi...
Weekly Contest #280
Are you sure it's okay for us just to show up unannounced? Of course, it's fine. It's my sister. She's going to be so happy to have some company. She's been on bed rest for a week because of the blood clot in her leg. She still has to stay home for another week. She's going to be so happy to have some company. Geez. I haven't seen her for probably 20, maybe 25 years. It's going to be wild seeing her again. I've been following her on social media for a while, and she looks exactly like the 18 year old I remember. Yeah. She will tell you it's ...
Weekly Contest #279
Back in the old days, the days before GPS and cell phones, and all the satellite tracking, a person could just get lost. Sometimes by accident, and sometimes on purpose. On occasion, it was easy to get un-lost based on where the sun was in the sky and whether it was morning or afternoon. If it was cloudy or overcast, getting un-lost was a challenge--we didn't know where we were going. At night, it was easy to get lost and harder still to reverse the circumstance. But once there was a boy, and there was me, and I was all kinds of lost in him....
Weekly Contest #278
Mom and Dad had decided to part ways with the Early American style hutch in the kitchen. Thank goodness. At one time it was a nice piece, but like most pieces of Early American furniture, it had become a large, clunky, but very shiny eyesore. The behemoth had lived in our kitchen for as long as I could remember, and now just in time for my 21st birthday party with friends and family the following weekend, Mom had decided to update the look of the kitchen. The new furniture was scheduled to arrive tomorrow, and today we were going to empty th...
Weekly Contest #277
They told me what to do, and I did it. Of course, things didn't turn out exactly like we all thought they would. It all ended in a disaster, leaving me a complete scrambled mess. I had received the call a few days before. The photographers wanted me. They assured me they had everything squared away with wardrobe, and my look was perfect for their new campaign. It's possible that in my excitement I neglected to ask for any details about the new campaign, whatever it might be, or who the client might be. Know this, Gentle Reader: I had been wo...
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