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Submitted to Contest #338
The barcode on the back cover was scratched so deep it looked like a scar. I still remembered the prison librarian’s handwriting on the checkout slip taped to the inside cover: Due: April 12, 1995. I’d been cuffed and put in a squad car seventeen minutes after I signed it.The book sat heavy on the wool blanket. It smelled of mildew and the basement damp of the county library, a smell that had not changed in twenty-eight years. My room smelled of damp plaster and the industrial soap they used to scrub the halls. The walls were painted a color...
Submitted to Contest #337
The divorce had left me with a surplus of hangers and a deficit of patience. I moved through the rooms of the house like a ghost haunting my own life, touching objects that used to mean something and finding them hollow. I was cleaning. It was a purge. I pulled things from the racks without mercy. There were blouses that were too optimistic and skirts that belonged to a woman who went to cocktail parties I no longer attended.Then I found the coat.It was a harsh, synthetic thing. I had bought it for twenty dollars during a lunch break three y...
Submitted to Contest #336
My daughter placed her hand on the table, and I knew she was trying to upload a feeling of ‘reassurance’ to a device I didn’t have installed in my brain. To me, it just looked like she was checking for dust.The dust was there, of course. It settled on the spines of the encylopedias and the rims of the ticking clocks that lined the walls like judging eyes. I was a man of dust. I was a man of texture. I liked the scratch of wool trousers and the bite of black coffee and the way a fountain pen caught the grain of the paper when you pressed too ...
Submitted to Contest #335
The headphones were heavy, pressing the sweat against Deidra's temples like a vice. Through the static, the voice on the other end sounded less like a monster and more like a boy who had broken a window. "Tell him," the boy whispered, "tell him I have the flowers."Three hours in the command unit and the air had turned to soup. Thick, electronic, hard to swallow. General Halloway loomed behind her chair, his breath hot against her neck. Three years in this desert had taught Deidra the weight of words, how a single mistranslation could turn a ...
Submitted to Contest #334
"Don't speak to the Man in the Grey Cloak, for he weaves lies into ropes to bind you." That is what Mother said every time she locked the heavy oak door. But Mother also said she loved me, and I had bruises that proved that was a lie, too.The kitchen smelled of burnt milk. Luca sat at the pine table, spine rigid, watching the empty porcelain plate that gleamed white as bone in the lamplight. His stomach twisted on itself like rope. The plate wasn't empty because he'd eaten. It was empty because Father had decided he wouldn't."You spilled the...
Submitted to Contest #333
The order ticket didn’t flutter; it hung heavy on the wire, weighted down by the impossibility of the request. Rabbit stew with juniper berries and exactly three drops of vinegar. His mother’s recipe.Thomas stood in the prison kitchen, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped wasps. The industrial dishwasher churned its final cycle. Steam rose from the sanitizer, sharp with chlorine. He read the ticket again. Richard Potts Block D. Execution scheduled for midnight.The paper trembled in his hands. Not from the ventilation system that ...
Submitted to Contest #332
The blue vanished from the sky first, sucked away like paint up a vacuum hose. Then the green bled out of the grass, leaving the world looking like a charcoal sketch. Vincent looked at his wife, terrifyingly certain that when the wind hit her, she would turn grey, proving their marriage was dead.Vincent gripped the steering wheel of the leased SUV until his knuckles turned the color of milk. The car cost eight hundred dollars a month. It was money they did not have, but appearances were the currency of the neighborhood, and Vincent was a man...
Submitted to Contest #331
I died on a Tuesday in a country my children couldn't find on a map, and for three years, that was the truest thing about me. Now I'm standing in the snow outside my own kitchen window, watching my wife laugh at something another man said. My daughter is seven now. She was four the last time I held her. The man sitting in my chair just cut her meat the way I used to, diagonal strokes, the way she likes.The cold doesn't touch me anymore. Not after thirty-one months in a cell where winter and summer felt the same. My boots sink into the fresh ...
Submitted to Contest #330
My father started forgetting the harvest before he forgot my name.When the tumor bloomed on the scan, he stared at it like a weather map, like maybe he could still outwait the storm. By the time I came home, the corn was stunted, the gutters sagged, and the man who’d once baled hay with his bare hands was struggling to find the bathroom in his own house.I found him standing in the kitchen that first morning, holding his coffee mug upside down. Brown liquid pooled on the linoleum.“Frank?” He squinted at me through the dawn light filtering thr...
Submitted to Contest #329
The sunlight on her skin smelled like crushed pears. That’s the last thing I can remember about the day I stopped being a man. And tonight, on the one night the dead are permitted to remember, they say the sun will return, just for me.I press my palm against the broken conservatory glass. The shards catch moonlight, fracturing it into pieces that look almost warm. Almost. Outside, the town of Brașov celebrates Halloween with American fervor they learned from television. Plastic jack-o’-lanterns glow in windows. Children dressed as monsters p...
Submitted to Contest #328
The river delivers my secrets in strict chronological order. This morning it returned a soggy paper boat I folded seventy-two years ago. The ink inside is different, as though the past has revised my own handwriting while I slept. I stood on the Embankment, pigeons pecking at the breadcrumbs scattered around my worn brogues, and turned the dripping vessel in my hands. The creased paper bore the watermark of Leighton & Sons Pharmacy, my father's shop that closed in 1964. But the message inside wasn't what I remembered writing. I felt my c...
Submitted to Contest #327
I have carried her secrets in my feathers for eighty-six years. Tonight, on her deathbed, she asked me, with a voice as soft as ash, if I’d fly her home. But I am selfish, and I do not want goodbye. The attic room trembles. Not from wind, though every window stands cracked to welcome the Samhain air. The walls themselves grow thin here, where life meets what waits beyond. I feel it in my hollow bones, that terrible softening of boundaries. Eira lies beneath wool blankets older than most of the villagers below. Her skin has gone translucent. ...
Submitted to Contest #326
In the end, the thing that killed us wasn't malice, or madness, but two tablespoons of filtered kindness dripped into a mug. The spreadsheet numbers swam before my eyes, each cell merging into the next. Quarter three projections. Always quarter three projections. The office had emptied hours ago, leaving me alone with fluorescent buzz and the water cooler's distant gurgle. That's when I noticed it again. Dr. Marta Levens' desk, three cubicles over, untouched for six weeks since she'd stopped coming. Nobody explained why. Medical leave, some ...
Submitted to Contest #325
Something was sitting in the passenger seat when I drove past the streetlight.I didn’t see it straight on—just a shape, like someone ducking their head in a hoodie.But when I turned, the seat was empty, and I was already doing seventy.My hands stayed steady on the wheel. Three years of driving nights, you learn not to jerk the car every time shadows play tricks. The Camry’s dashboard glowed green against the dark stretch of Route 37, that dead zone between Mechanicsburg and nowhere. No cell towers. No houses. Just trees pressing close to the...
Submitted to Contest #324
I didn't shout. I didn't wave, or thrash, or pray, either. Falling overboard wasn't exactly the plan, but I can't say I fought it. The rail had been cold against my palms. I'd been watching moonlight move across the black water like something alive, something breathing. My daughter had insisted on this cruise. "Dad, you need to get out," she'd said, her voice carrying that particular strain of worry that made me feel like a burden she was trying to redistribute. I slipped. The ship's rail caught my hip, then didn't, and suddenly I was in the...
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