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Weekly Contest #366
Normally, he’d have gone to meet her.That was partly because he loved her, though he wasn’t aware of that yet, but also because he was a creature of habit. The same walk into town, the same spot in his favourite padded booth at the restaurant, the same bench shaded by a canopy of trees that reflected patterns of ambers and greens along the moving river. Even better if these things were shared with her. The reason he didn’t go was that he was a little stoned. It made the computer game he was playing more interesting, the colours more vivid, t...
Weekly Contest #364
Apart from a faint glow coming from one of the back rooms, the town’s only charity shop was in darkness. Its front door remained firmly locked, a small but unsettling detail in a town where everyone knew everyone else’s routines. The shop had opened every morning since 1985, and before that the old riverside building had served the town as a bank, a pharmacy and a tavern. Places where people had always come looking for what they needed. The shop stood close to the river in Marpleton, a pleasant English market town which had once grown round ...
Weekly Contest #362
RECIPE FOR BAKED ALASKA INGREDIENTS You’ll need two quarts of vanilla ice cream. There you have me. What’s a quart exactly? Siri will know. I’m wondering if I haven’t become a bit too attached to “him” lately. Maybe it’s that “manly” voice. Friendly but firm, with a trace of, “If you try my patience too far, you never know what might happen.” Promises, promises! Hey Siri. (In my breeziest voice, but really just practicing for Ben later). Uh huh. WHAT IS A QUART? (Clear enunciation to avoid misunderstanding).(Circling of an AI brain at the bo...
Weekly Contest #357
The greatest blasphemy in Egypt is not doubting the gods. It is serving them after the doubt has begun. In exactly nine hours the sun will be gone. Only I understand what that means. I watch from my chamber window as dawn breaks. On the longest day of the year, a silent throng converges upon the temple grounds. Every face turns east. The sun is a throbbing ball, cutting through the haze and bleeding light across distant palms. Even before the heavens warp, the people feared the sky.Canet, my young servant, lacked the discipline for priesthoo...
Weekly Contest #355
Thursday Evening (Upstairs Room, Community Centre) They all sat round a rickety coffee table perched on plastic seats in varying degrees of discomfort like they were trying to prove something. At least, to themselves. On the counter squatted a kettle that never boiled properly, and biscuits nobody trusted enough to eat. Well, all except for Bert. But then Bert would munch his way through pretty much anything. Last week, the focus had been on him. Tonight, it shifted. Josh, the raven-haired, pony-tailed facilitator, scanned his notes and clea...
Weekly Contest #353
A Trace Of Green With a coffee as bitter as his thoughts, Mike barely heard the waves lashing against the walls of his lighthouse home. For ten years, he had painted the sea in blacks and whites, with only the occasional hint of grey breaking through. Brighter strokes felt as futile as chasing something that refused to be held. Once a renowned artist, his earlier scenes of bathers drifting through sunlit water had been praised by the public—though quietly dismissed by critics. He was never satisfied with them, haunted by blank spaces and a s...
Weekly Contest #351
Everything In Its Place Jack’s Story I don’t understand. It was just an accident, but everyone keeps acting like accidents have to mean something.It started when Mum said I should try volunteering at a charity shop because she thought I might enjoy it. Before that, I’d spent a few months in a restaurant kitchen. It was ok at first, but then the chef left. They got a new one who wanted me to change my shifts. Also, everyone was running round like headless chickens. I mean, even more than usual.When people sent the food back and complained, th...
Weekly Contest #348
The Perfect Dog Sometimes Margi dreamed of a dog that didn’t poop, dig up the garden, bark for no reason, or embarrass her by rifling through her friends’ bags the moment they sat down. It was a small dream—but a stubborn one. When Fred entered Margi’s life, he was like a rainbow breaking through cloud, bringing colour and dissolving the grey. Margi was determined to get it right this time. Mindful that he wasn’t an ordinary dog, she reassured herself she’d manage perfectly well—unless she developed dementia, or some other feared decline. E...
Weekly Contest #345
CW: this story mentions the death of a child. This isn’t happening. After eighteen months of being a ghost in my own life, the one train I need has been cancelled. I can’t afford another failure. Not today, when the stakes are finally real. I stand beneath the station board, watching the crisp white text flicker above the black. The 7.54 is gone, replaced by a void. A shortage of crew, apparently. Just my luck that the universe chooses this morning to run out of people. Did somebody decide to pull a sickie at the last minute? If only I’d li...
Weekly Contest #341
I step off the train and walk down rain-blurred streets that were once vibrant with the thrum of students, enticing shops, lively old pubs — now mostly closed down, shuttered up. I was thinner then, shivered more, but the cold is the same biting monster, seeping through my clothes. I keep walking, telling myself it’s just the wind, not a need. Every footfall on the cracked pavement feels like a drumbeat, echoing a life I promised myself I would never return to. I’m heading for the door.Still faded blue. I stand beneath it, looking up at the ...
Weekly Contest #339
It was unseasonably hot in the June sun and the house felt like a swollen, airless lung, but Mary wouldn’t open the French windows—she knew what came if she did. She sank into the hall chair, watching the early evening light fall across the faded doormat, and wondered if anyone else would notice the small rhythms of a house like this. She had crawled into the house at 6.30 p.m., her body a map of localised fires. Despite care taken, a supportive manager, and the kindness of some of the volunteers at the charity shop where she worked, the fla...
Weekly Contest #337
What the smoke left behind I teeter along the narrow aisle that leads to the back of the staff room in kitten heels, already aware that I don’t quite belong anywhere I can be seen—or reached. A few bobs of acknowledgment are thrown my way as I move through the fug. The GANG OF FIVE, as I’ve come to think of them, sit together inhaling cigarettes with varying degrees of impunity. Bodies curl into the shabby sofas, lightly touching—conspirators in a world that may not like our smell, but still tolerates us. Health warnings on packets don’t ma...
Weekly Contest #334
In a land far, far away, there lived a young dragon who pretended she was part of a tree.If you had passed through Deep Oak Wood during the old days, you might have thought the thick, high twisting branch was simply another knot of bark, silvered with lichen and bent by centuries of weather. Unless you were a toadstool or a fairy, you probably wouldn’t have noticed how it breathed, slowly and carefully, or how the leaves around it leaned inward, as if listening. Unless you were a wise woman, that is. Or a dragon.Like Minna.Minna was perfecti...
Weekly Contest #332
Winter’s cold eyes seemed to watch her from the other side of the glass. When Rhea opened the blinds, the garden crouched under a hard, pewter sky—colourless, waiting like an adversary she’d never agreed to fight. Even the air seemed poised to steal something from her if she stepped outside. She drew her dressing gown tight and muttered the dreaded word—Christmas. It offered little relief; it merely voiced the echo of a life that felt unreachable, though saying it aloud shifted something inside her chest. Every year, she and Lyndsey had stoo...
Weekly Contest #331
Alone in the charity shop, Karen watched the snow fall against the window, each drifting flake a reminder that life had a way of delivering things you hadn’t asked for. She was counting the minutes until closing when the door opened, and the man in black stepped inside—the one who always arrived too late and lingered too long, a small frustration in a day already full of them. The last globe had been perched precariously near the door, and when he brushed past, it toppled. He stooped, long coat obscuring the breakage, and even offered to pay...
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