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Weekly Contest #369
By the fourth month after Daniel died, people had stopped bringing food. Mara considered this progress. There had been a period, immediately after the funeral, when grief apparently required carbohydrates. Lasagna appeared in silver trays. Banana bread multiplied on the counter. Someone she barely knew brought a baked ziti large enough to feed an infantry unit and stood in Mara’s kitchen explaining that she needed to eat. Mara had wanted to say, Thank God you came. I was planning to starve beside this perfectly functional refrigerator. Inste...
Weekly Contest #368
My mother never told a lie she couldn’t make someone else remember. She did it so gently that for most of my life I mistook it for conversation. “You haven’t heard from your sister, have you?” My mother was standing at the kitchen sink, her forearms submerged in water gone cloudy with dish soap. Beyond the window, August had swollen the hydrangeas until their blue heads sagged against the porch rail, and somewhere beyond the trees thunder moved without getting any closer. “I talked to Anna Tuesday.” “Oh.” She rinsed a glass, then swept damp ...
The first thing Mara learned about being human was that fear had a smell.It lived in the stairwell of the apartment building on Calder Street, beneath bleach, old cooking oil and the salty, artificial smell of instant soup drifting beneath someone’s door. The superintendent sprayed disinfectant over the railings twice a day, and its medicinal sting had worked its way into the carpet and walls.Somewhere upstairs, something scorched in a toaster.Fear smelled faintly metallic, like pennies held too long in a warm hand.Mara stood on the fourth-f...
Weekly Contest #366
The first thing Claire Whitmore noticed about Daniel Vale was that he smiled when he lied. Not the obvious kind of lie. Not the rushed, uncomfortable kind people told when they needed a moment to rearrange the truth. Daniel’s lies were smoother than that. They arrived with a calm voice, an easy expression, and the confidence of a man who had already considered every possible outcome and decided he would be the one left standing. Claire knew people like him. Or at least, she thought she did. She had spent most of her life walking through hous...
Weekly Contest #364
You have learned that birthdays are never just birthdays. They arrive carrying more than candles and cake. They carry memories, expectations, old conversations, and the quiet hope that maybe this time things will feel different. Your mother’s eightieth birthday has been sitting in the back of your mind for months. You want it to be meaningful. Not extravagant. Not perfect. Meaningful. You sit at your kitchen table late in the afternoon, your laptop open in front of you, the house quiet around you. It is a different kind of quiet now. Your ch...
Weekly Contest #362
For seven years, the sun had not risen. Eve learned to measure mornings by the weight of the cold. Frost crept across the inside of the windows—thin white veins spreading through the glass like something trying to get in. She stood barefoot on the kitchen floor anyway. The tiles were ice. Behind her, Ethan moved quietly—too quietly for a man about to leave someone’s life. A cardboard box sat open on the counter between them. Its flaps trembled slightly every time the wind pressed against the house. Eve wrapped her burgundy scarf tighter arou...
Weekly Contest #360
TW: Terminal illness, grief The letter arrived folded into thirds, its edges worn soft by many hands. It stretched across two pages, but Regina saw only seven words: Your mother is very sick. Come quickly. She stood by the factory window long after the whistle had blown, reading the sentence again and again, as if enough repetitions might turn it into something else. Outside, the Bronx moved with its usual impatience. Streetcars rattled past. Children darted between wagons. A man shouted in Yiddish from a pushcart overflowing with onions. In...
Weekly Contest #359
You learn early that meaning is not stable inside certain rooms. It shifts after it is spoken. It shifts after you respond. It shifts again when you think it has settled.You don’t have language for this at first. Only sensation. A tightening before words, a scanning after them and a sense that something is still unresolved even when everyone else behaves as if it is finished.The office is where you notice it again.It is your first week, but already the air feels like it belongs to someone else’s expectations.Ashley sits across from you at th...
Weekly Contest #358
The palace of Varelle sat upon white cliffs above the sea, so vast that travelers often mistook it for a city. Its towers pierced the clouds. Its marble terraces stretched toward the horizon like open arms. Sunlight poured across turquoise pools lined with polished stone, while fountains sent silver ribbons of water dancing through the air. Beyond the palace walls, gardens unfolded in every direction—orchards heavy with fruit, winding paths draped in roses, and quiet ponds where swans drifted through reflections of cypress trees. Every eveni...
Weekly Contest #356
May 16 I think the mistake was made before we even missed the bus. Not logistically.Emotionally. The actual missing of the bus only took about eight seconds. We turned the corner.The Coach ultra sleek white and silver bus was there.Then it wasn’t. I remember Clara making this small sound—not even a word, more like someone being punched lightly in the stomach. “Oh my God.”And then immediately afterward: “This is my fault.” I told her it wasn’t.Of course I told her it wasn’t. But the unfortunate thing about guilt is that once someone fully acc...
Weekly Contest #355
The restaurant was called The Green Parlor because thirty years earlier a newspaper critic had praised the ferns near the entrance, and the owner, who trusted praise more than instinct, had preserved the name long after the plants themselves had disappeared. In their place stood a refrigerated dessert case containing six exhausted slices of cheesecake and a neon yellow lemon tart slowly collapsing into itself. Outside, rain lacquered the city into reflections. Inside, the room glowed with the subdued amber light favored by expensive restaura...
Weekly Contest #354
On this planet, love was no longer private. It had become administrative. Not because emotion had disappeared, but because survival had made it inefficient to leave partnership to chance, or longing, or individual preference. When resources narrowed and population stability became fragile, intimacy stopped being treated as instinct and started being treated as infrastructure. The older word had been marriage. No one used it anymore without irony. Now it was called alignment. ⸻ Elaine had always understood the system in theory, the way people...
Elaine kept the lights off when she got home because the dark made the apartment feel larger. Outside her single oval window, the planet Sera-9 glowed in bruised shades of violet and copper beneath three fractured moons. Cargo ships moved across the atmosphere like slow-moving stars, their engines leaving white scars through the night. From the thirty-second level of the housing stack, the city looked alive—millions of people packed into towers of glass and steel, connected by magnetic rails and glowing walkways. But her apartment always fel...
Weekly Contest #351
Elaine noticed the road first. Nothing had changed, not exactly. The same turns were there, the same stoplight, the same gas station on the corner. But it took longer to reach them. Not enough that she could measure it—just enough to feel it. Greg kicked the back of her seat. Once, then again. “Mom. I’m hungry.” “I just fed you.” “No you didn’t.” “I did. In the kitchen. I watched you eat.” Caroline shifted beside him. “I’m hungry too.” Elaine tightened her grip on the wheel. “You’re not.” Greg kicked again, harder this time. “Both of you, st...
Weekly Contest #350
Elaine had not spoken to her sister since the wedding. It wasn’t the marriage itself that made it difficult. It was the groom. Mara had always been competitive in ways that didn’t require rules, and Elaine had learned—over time—that anything left unattended could be repositioned as hers. This included, apparently, a husband. So when they were both cast in a televised relationship experiment called The Aligned Partnership Grant, Elaine assumed it was a mistake. It wasn’t. ⸻ The show was popular for all the wrong reasons. On paper, it was a he...
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