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Weekly Contest #262
The Summer sun beat down relentlessly upon the car roof, cooking it. Jenner shook his head at the shimmering air, not looking forward to climbing into an intensity of heat that his motor’s blowers had no chance of banishing. Huffing his annoyance at the sun and it’s tardy seasonal appearance, he started the engine and lowered the front windows. Still the radiating heat threatened to singe his eyebrows. It was barely ten a.m. “What’s the world coming to, eh?” he asked the car, patting its dash. His Audi was nigh on a museum piece. He didn’t e...
There was once a life within which I existed. Encased in a fantastical ecosystem designed to cocoon me from the pain of reality. Then it was over. A breeze-block in the face. I didn’t see it coming. The impact of the ending sent shockwaves of negative energy into batteries hidden deep within my body such that every time I thought I might have some respite from the pain of my sudden, shattering loss, those batteries fired up and fried my nervous system, leaving me reverberating with a sickness that I could not comprehend, let alone deal with....
Weekly Contest #261
There are no words. This is because I have never bothered to bring them together in any meaningful way. The words exist, but I chose to dwell in a feeling. Not always the same feeling at that. I am no poet. I have never tried to describe the sky as it puts on a show and reminds me that it can wear colours other than blue. Other than grey. The sky is the sky. It was here before I ever arrived on the scene, and it will be here long after I am gone. So long that it may as well be an eternity, and I have no understanding of what that means...
Weekly Contest #260
…there is no end. That is the difference between life and a book. Not a story. Stories are merely parts of a book or a life. Stories that are the constituent parts of a book, shoehorned into a finite space to please the reader. Some writers may protest at this assessment. The pomposity of their convenient disregard of themselves as the original reader is a big lie. That lie distorts and corrupts. It is a fiction that detracts from fiction as an artform. But then the artist is as selfish as they come. Whereas art is not. Art is a gift that ke...
Weekly Contest #259
Sam sits on the bus and gazes out over the craven and piteous sea of humanity. The bus is filled almost to the brim, that will leave a tide mark, the thought of which nauseates him. People stand shoulder to shoulder bracing themselves against accidental contact. He imagines the bus hitting a wall or a lorry or another bus. The last option fits best. The two buses coming together in a clumsy caress, their contents redistributed by the passion of the two inept red lovers. Life is short and ever so fragile. Not that any of these people are livi...
Weekly Contest #258
It’s a Thursday and in its Thursdayness it is grey and unremarked. The daily annotation deconstructs the flow of time, a swamping of cheap custard over the artistry of a pâtissier. The point is drowned out. Meaning is washed away, and few will ever go in search of its bloated corpse. Dan wends his weary way home. Drops his work bag in the porch. That bag haunts his life. Its position as a sentry is a badly thought out mistake. He’s reminded of the work he hasn’t completed each and every time he passes through the front door. That bag stains ...
There was a well-known, famous and very funny comedian who was always destined for the stage and fame. His energy told you all you had to know about what he was and what he was for. The man was made to grab a crowd by the scruff of the neck and drag them to a better place. A place where people laughed at themselves, and each other, and in so doing exorcised the demons who’d hitched a ride inside them on their rollercoaster ride through life. This man had his own demons. Everybody does, but comedians don’t have the luxury of laugh t...
Weekly Contest #257
She laughs as the song comes on the radio and in that laugh he sees the girl she once was. He wants to be young again. To know her through the ages. To be with her and share his life with her. All of her. To know her from the very start and onwards, into an eternity which he could not bear if it was not for her, and a love he had not thought possible. Not for him. Not for them. He supposes the song is a classic now, but he remembers when it was first played on older, crackling radios. Those radios were new back then, now they are obsolete. R...
Weekly Contest #256
In the heat of battle you are transformed. There is so much less to the world and yet you become so much more. The flesh may be weak, but the spirit rises up to be counted when death stares it in the eye. Once you have tasted that exotic and intoxicating poison, the life you lead dies. There are vestiges of something that sometimes resembles a life, but all it really amounts to is awaiting the next adventure in the jaws of death. “I call it The Test,” I say before wiping the ale foam from my beard. “And I call it Hot Air,” Balur grins at me ...
Weekly Contest #255
Fred nurses his pint as though it’s the final part of his death row meal. He stares down into the amber depths contemplating all the answers that reside there. Answers reduced in size so that he can no longer see them. The fact of the matter is that he’s suffered that reduction. He is deflated and no longer has awe for the infinite. His part in this charade was written out long ago. He finishes his pint, then looks around him. He doesn’t look lost exactly, more perturbed that this is where he’s been washed up. A useless piece of flotsam havi...
Vicky was still there. That was the kicker. That was the cause of a perpetual limbo that wore a different outfit every time John blinked. So many thoughts. And they whirled around and around in his head leaving a trail of sticky candy floss in the stead of a coherent mind. It hurt. But he loved her. He loved her and that was all that mattered. John had never stopped loving Vicky. He didn’t know how. He knew all about love. After all, he’d been practicing it since he was born. He’d read about it too. There were many stories about love. And th...
Weekly Contest #254
The invitation stipulated the attire. John was never a fan of formal dress. Comfortable anywhere other than a suit and the places where a suit gained entry. To John, a suit was armour and he was a lover, not a fighter. He aimed at loving pursuits, not that it got him anywhere. He consoled himself with the avoidance of the fight. Even the prospect of conflict left him cold. Sometimes, he wondered whether he was a coward. He didn’t feel any cowardice trembling in his blood, but then people became desensitised to their sins, telling themselves ...
Weekly Contest #253
It had to be perfect. And what was more perfect than the place where it all began? The place that they had made theirs. A vantage point from which they had imperiously surveyed their birthplace, their birth right and the world beyond. A world that awaited them with open arms. A world that lacked its gods and cried out for them to take their rightful place at its head. This was a place as perfect as they were back then. And they were gods in those heady days. Their dreams were not the mere dreams of mortal men. They saw beyond that ...
My Mum once told me to enjoy life. But she added a warning, and that warning was that time has a habit of speeding up as you get older. She may as well have told me not to panic. Or to smile, and that it might never happen. That was the attention I paid to her advice, and to her for that matter. And yet I remember her words well, and now, in the context of who and what I have become, I understand where she was coming from. This wasn’t a soundbite. This wasn’t knowledge. She meant what she had said, and in order for me to understand, I had to...
Weekly Contest #252
As Bill walked home he put his unease down to the fact that he had not been feeling right all day. The day itself had taken against him from the outset. Rising from the messy pit of his bed he’d paused in his half-arsed redistribution of his duvet. Dumped the forgotten duvet at the foot of the bed and patted at a spot on the sheet that looked about as wrong as it had any business looking. The situation of this patch was embarrassing, being in the area where his crotch and backside vied for position as he tossed and turned in the grip of the ...
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