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Weekly Contest #376
The first thing Vivian Mercer stole was a lemon. It was an ordinary lemon, bright yellow and slightly soft near the stem, sitting in a ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter of a woman she had known for twenty-three years. Vivian had no use for it. There were four perfectly good lemons in her own refrigerator, along with half a lime she kept meaning to throw away. She didn't particularly like lemons unless they were accompanied by vodka, which her gastroenterologist had recently discouraged. Nevertheless, while her friend Patricia stood with...
Weekly Contest #375
The day began with the dog refusing breakfast. This should not have frightened Mara as much as it did. Sophie had refused breakfast because of rain, fireworks, a garbage truck, and once because Daniel had moved her bowl approximately eighteen inches to the left. Still, Mara stood over the untouched chicken and rice at seven-thirty in the morning and felt something tighten behind her ribs. “She didn’t eat.” Daniel looked up from his phone. “She’ll eat.” “She always scarfs it down right away.” “You said last week she didn’t eat all morni...
Weekly Contest #373
Daniel said he had slept beside her all night, but the couch remembered differently. It was six fourteen in the morning, though the kitchen clock said two seventeen, as it had for almost three years. Daniel had offered to replace it, but Mara liked the ridiculous plastic cat and insisted she didn’t need to know the time every second of the day. This was technically true, though she checked the microwave clock almost compulsively. “Daniel.” “Hmm?” “Did you sleep here last night?” He turned from the counter with the coffee scoop suspended...
Weekly Contest #372
By six o’clock, Judith had filled twelve boxes and accomplished almost nothing. The dining room was bare except for the chandelier and the pale rectangles on the walls where her mother’s pictures had hung. Without them, the room looked larger and somehow embarrassed, like someone caught undressed. Judith carried another box into the kitchen and dropped it beside the others. Ava’s name was written across the top in black marker. “Of course,” she muttered. Inside were two high school yearbooks, a ceramic horse with one ear, the entire Flow...
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. I...
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...
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 four...
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 ...
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. You...
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 ...
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...
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 a...
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 eve...
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 someo...
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 restaur...
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