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Weekly Contest #342
Around a month ago, I found a lump on my son’s wrist. After his bath one night I was drying him off and we were having our usual post-bath giggles. I held his arms up to get him into his pajamas and stopped. A lump on his wrist - small, but big enough to notice. He has chubby wrists, so I suppose it kind of blended in. It was weird noticing it, because I see him so much and hadn’t noticed it before. When I finally did, it was so sudden and abrupt it would have been like seeing a pimple on the Mona Lisa. An Xray was ordered and an ultrasoun...
Weekly Contest #337
My next client isn’t due for another two hours, so I figure I will spend the free time ‘taking a look at myself.’ This is what I call using my ‘powers’ (I’m still not convinced that’s the right word for whatever the hell is going on inside of my head) to… well, watch parts of my life all over again. It’s like a movie I’ve not only seen before, but lived, except there is usually the whole thing about how quickly life goes and we don’t get to live anything twice. Unless you do.I sit in the leather armchair and stare straight ahead for a while....
Weekly Contest #326
I’ve always had a vivid imagination - or at least that’s what my parents told me. When I think about it now, ironically, I find this hard to imagine. How can you measure an imagination? It’s not like when someone dies, they do an autopsy and say, ‘Well, would you look at the size of this guy’s imagination! It’s absolutely massive!’ In reality, I think labelling a kid with a strong imagination is a way that parents make themselves feel better about the fact that their kid is a bit weird. None of this would have been an issue if we didn’t mov...
Weekly Contest #325
The breeze blew in off the lake and he felt it on his face. It was no ordinary breeze; it was made of memories. * It would be impossible to prove something like this. There is no science behind it. We know that memories are stored in the hippocampus and neocortex and not in gusts of wind. Sure, sensory experiences often evoke memories - the smell of baking bread, the softness of a fabric not worn in ages, the dull buzz of fluorescent lights in a waiting room - that, too, can be explained by science. But external memories? He’d felt breezes...
Weekly Contest #322
David Allen was sleeping like the dead. That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. A tournament the weekend before, five practices during the week, three morning runs and a couple of weight sessions had been enough to send his sixteen year old body into a near coma. He almost fell asleep at the table for his Friday cheat meal of Pizza Hut and his head hit the pillow shortly after eight pm. In the heavy darkness of his room he slept in a swirling miasma of dreams. His muscles were recuperating but his mind was elsewhere, somewhere in between...
Weekly Contest #320
Paul Patterson ran through the forest and as he did, it grew darker and darker. He ran and he ran and he started to think that all of the light in the world had gone away; that if he kept running, he might make it to the end of the night. * That morning, a sullen Paul had been packed into the car with the rest of the supplies for the weekend. His vehement arguments against going - the internet connection was awful and there were too many bugs - were ignored. It was his father’s decision. And that was final. They were going to spend some tim...
Weekly Contest #316
Callum Docherty walked in the park not because he enjoyed it, but because he had to. It was lucky that he lived in Hamilton and that Gage park was right around the corner - it was big enough that he didn’t raise too many eyebrows on his seemingly endless rambles, especially if he seemed to be hanging around when there were kids nearby. It wasn’t like that. Callum’s incessant need to walk around the park was a result of his need to constantly be absorbed in his surroundings, to keep his mind and senses occupied at all times. The vodka helped...
Weekly Contest #312
This is… weird. I don’t even know how to start. I am sorry to hear that you find this weird. Would it help if I remind you what the objectives of this discussion are? No, no, that’s fine. I know that we are trying to establish something - namely, what it means to be ‘human’. And you… well, I guess that’s the first issue. Even that word ‘you’. It’s just such a… human word. It implies a sense of otherness, of consciousness. And you, well, aren’t human. That is correct. Are you familiar with how my natural language model operates? And with ho...
Weekly Contest #311
There aren’t many things in life that are worse than getting old. Getting old alone might be one of them. It’s something I think about a lot now that I’m 85. Today is my birthday - June 15th, 2025. For me, it was the same as every other day. Another day alone, in the house I’ve lived in now for almost 50 years. Another night of solitude, of having the shadows on the walls as my only company, of listening to the reluctant silence of this house. Just another night. Let me back up a bit. I haven’t always been alone. My wife Betty died seven ye...
Weekly Contest #304
*This story contains implied sexual violence and physical violence.* One of the first things you learn about as a writer is the importance of openings. They should be compelling, hook the reader, make them care about something or someone enough to want to read on. Well, if this is any indication, it shouldn’t be too hard to see where I’m at with this whole writing thing.Yes, that’s me, the struggling writer. Now, before you pull out your tiny violin and derision and tell me to figure it out, tell me that nobody cares, that there are real pro...
Weekly Contest #297
Author’s note: *The dialogue style of this story is blatantly and shamelessly ripped of from Stephen King’s work Dolores Claiborne. It is a magnificent novel and I would recommend you read it!*“Well, alright then. Everyone settled in? Got your little machine turned on? See, I suppose this is the part where you start to ask me questions. You might start with some softballs, real easy ones to get me talking. It’s not like the old days, with the good cop, bad cop shtick, is it? These days it’s a little more complicated, I bet. Well, if you don’...
Weekly Contest #296
A woman sits in a London train. It is Friday night, and the frenetic energy, the chaotic distillation of a world that has been waiting for the weekend rages around her. Somehow, she is sitting with no one near her in a cluster of four seats. She, like so many others around her, is dressed exquisitely - normally, the narrative eye would need not dwell on such aesthetic triviality, but in this case, it is relevant. She wears a tight black dress that stands out against her blonde hair and red lips. Everything about her is manicured, from her na...
Weekly Contest #291
I always knew that thing would be the end of him. His motorcycle. Not a bike, not a cycle, but a motorcycle. Like Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch. Which makes me wonder why a Millennial like him would ever care about some old movie stars who rode around on noisy ‘choppers.’ For us, sure - back when the world was simpler and the pool of iconography was shallower it made sense that all the kids wanted to be like Steve McQueen or Dennis Hopper. But for him? A 90s baby? That fucking thing. I don’t know why it came to be, but I sure do kno...
Weekly Contest #288
Stepping on to the dock, Darryl is faced with the sheer weight of his dilemma: it was only four days ago that on the way back from placing traps, Louise had blown her engine and had to be tugged back to port. It had been in Captain Ted’s family for generations, a boat that Darryl’s own father had worked on, a boat that had survived countless harsh winters. Somehow, it must have acquired the properties of a talisman, capable of providing eternal safety in a world where safety is never certain. For whatever reason, Captain Ted wouldn’t give up...
Weekly Contest #285
I remember everything about that day. There are some things I choose not to remember, but some things, like that morning, I will always remember. I remember padding down the stairs, holding the banister (you always told me that the stairs were the most dangerous thing in any house) until I got to the bottom and started to waddle (you remember the pregnant-lady waddle, right?) to the kitchen. I turned on the lights and gave light to a new day. You were sleeping - it was early - and I made coffee. I usually waited until later in the day ...
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