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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...
Elaine did not believe in breakthroughs.In her experience, things either worked or they didn’t. You fixed what you could, and the rest—eventually—stopped asking.This philosophy had served her well in property management, tenant disputes, and one brief but decisive marriage.It did not, however, prevent her from accidentally attending something called a “Sunset Mindfulness Mixer.”It had been described to her—repeatedly—as “low-pressure.” There were seventeen people wearing linen.A woman named Trish approached her immediately, holding two glass...
Weekly Contest #349
The ground didn’t look burned. That was the problem. It looked paused—like the world had stopped mid-breath and never decided to finish it. ⸻ They were in what used to be downtown Newark. Elaine knew that because one of the older men still said it sometimes—Newark—like the name itself might hold the place together. It didn’t. ⸻ Buildings stood open like broken teeth. Glass had long since been ground into powder, lifting with every step and settling into the back of the throat until breathing felt like swallowing something dry and permanent. ...
There are many ways to measure a life’s happiness. This one keeps track of miles. Elaine noticed the road first. Not that anything had changed. It just took longer to reach things. The stoplight. The turn. The familiar corner where the gas station sat like it always had. Longer. Greg kicked the back of her seat. Once. Twice. “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.” “You’re not.” “I am.” Greg kicked again. “Both of you stop.” The road ahead...
Weekly Contest #348
The overhead lights didn’t just hum; they vibrated—a cold, electric heartbeat that thrummed right through the center of Elaine’s skull. It was 11:47 PM. She was only here because she had, yet again, forgotten the single most crucial ingredient for the morning. Another failure. Another demand on her shrinking reserves of time and patience.Her thumbs were a blurred assault on her phone screen, a frantic, resentful drumbeat to the tune of a text message thread that had been arguing back at her for three hours.*You just don’t get it. I can’t be ...
The fluorescent hum of the aisle lights was a direct vibration against Elaine’s headache. It was 11:47 PM. She was only here because she had, yet again, forgotten the single most crucial ingredient for the morning. Another demand on her shrinking reserves of time.Her thumbs were a blurred assault on her phone screen, a frantic, resentful drumbeat to the tune of a text message thread that had been arguing back at her for three hours.*You just don’t get it. I can’t be everything to everyone. I am one person.*She jabbed the "Send" arrow, the me...
Weekly Contest #347
Before she knew what tension was, she knew how it sounded. It lived in the house like a hum—low and constant—threading through the flicker of the television her father watched every night after work. The blue light washed over his face, sharpening the angles, flattening everything else. He came home late. Always late. The door would open, the air would shift, and the house would hold its breath. On Saturdays, he worked too. On Sundays, he rested. Tight white undies and a bare chest. Comfortable in his own skin. The television stayed on whet...
The ceilings in his house rose in perfect geometry. When the chandeliers were lit, the light fell in narrow lines across the polished floor, as if even brightness had learned to behave itself. Margaret noticed it the first evening she came to dinner. “It’s beautiful,” she said, turning slowly beneath the light. “Everything is so precise.” He smiled at that. Precision was a compliment he understood. “Design is just discipline,” he said. “If you measure carefully enough, nothing goes wrong.” Margaret laughed softly. “That must make life very s...
Weekly Contest #346
Inside my body there sat an ache, so I tucked a kiss into my pocket and saved it for later. Not a real one. Just the idea of one. I folded it carefully and tucked it deep into the lining, where my fingers could find it whenever the house grew too quiet. I saved it for later. I saved it because I suspected, even then, that kisses were rare in my house. They appeared suddenly, like summer lightning, and vanished just as quickly. Our house was not a battlefield. There were no slammed doors or broken plates. The war in our home moved differentl...
Naomi leaned against the cool glass of the passenger window, listening to the tires hum over the asphalt. The road stretched ahead, dark and unbroken, two pale lines sliding steadily into the night. Somewhere far off, the highway vanished into nothing—or perhaps it had always been nothing, and they were simply moving through the space it left behind. Static whispered from the radio, a thin crackle that briefly gave way to a guitar line before dissolving again into soft, humming silence. In the back seat, Lila opened her small vinyl carry cas...
Weekly Contest #343
There once was a man who loved control more than he loved air. He did not begin this way. He was born on a moshav in Israel, where citrus trees split the heat with their sharp sweetness and dust clung to ankles. His father ran a girls’ school — posture, discipline, straight lines. His mother worked for WIZO and believed nourishment was proof of love. As a baby, he sat in a wooden highchair in a narrow tiled kitchen. The spoon came whether he opened his mouth or not. “Eat.” If he turned away, the spoon followed. If he gagged, it pressed deepe...
Weekly Contest #342
Evelyn was the youngest, and everyone knew it by the way the room softened when she entered. Regina noticed it every time — how voices lowered, how shoulders eased, how even her brothers shifted their chairs to make space. Regina had not entered rooms that way. She had crossed an ocean with two dresses folded into a borrowed suitcase and hands already roughened by work. No one had taken her by the wrist and guided her forward. Whatever steadiness she wanted, she would have to build with her own palms. She had arrived in New York at thirteen...
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