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Weekly Contest #375
The Launch, Pacific Ocean, April 28, 1789. My darling Betsy, Only with you can I be truly open and admit the truth. Much as I long for you now, I would not wish you to suffer my travails for a single second. If you were here, you would know exactly what to say to soothe my troubled thoughts. All these years at sea should have sharpened my instinct for danger, yet to recognise the storm gathering around me proved impossible until it was too late. I carry these pages in my coat pocket now, written in the gloom of the open launch while aro...
Weekly Contest #373
Half dozing, Maisie could easily have mistaken the news presenter for one of the AI models she was reporting on. Too perfect to be real, the presenter was reporting on malfunctions in a tiny percentage of the leading AI firm’s models. Designed to integrate seamlessly into everyday life, they promised to eliminate boredom, loneliness, anxiety, and even grief. Stroking her adorable Scottie, Bailey, as he nestled in her lap, Maisie heard something about a tech company removing affected units for urgent retesting, before yawning and switching...
Weekly Contest #372
It’s that time of night when you have no business being awake, with thoughts for companions no one would want. Switching on the lamp, you check the odds and ends in the bedside drawer. Earplugs. Check. Vaseline. Check. The odd paperback. Still worth checking — though you’re no longer able to read it. Mostly you check for pills. You scrabble around only to find all the packets are empty. How did that happen? Can it really be thirty years since his life ended? If you can call it a life. Your bony hands grip the bannister. Another fall wou...
Weekly Contest #371
The demolition date had been fixed for the following week. The last of the staff and students, including Brenda, had left Thrushcroft School for Girls at the end of the 90s, by which time Jane was long gone. Since then, the school had become the home of spiders, rats, and broken things. After years of neglect, parts of the building were unstable. Driving past, Brenda occasionally caught the outline of the octagonal hall rising from the redbrick frontage of the main building. Now, keeping just under the speed limit, the car was her last lin...
Weekly Contest #368
Karen could have sat and calculated the number of times she’d stepped through the shop’s front door during twenty years of service, but didn’t want to. The charity shop had always held a distinct atmosphere, but this morning something felt different. It was still only August. The heat was sweltering, schools were closed, and Christmas was already creeping onto the shelves. The usual boxes of seasonal gifts had begun arriving alongside other donations: fairy lights, tinsel, cards, Christmas jumpers, and untrendy baubles that would likely li...
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 roun...
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 ...
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 priesth...
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 c...
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...
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...
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...
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 t...
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 fl...
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 perfe...
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