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Weekly Contest #350
Let me be clear about something before we go any further. I have all my teeth. Well, thirty of them. The other two I lost in 1987 to a gentleman named Ricky Foss, who had opinions about the Pittsburgh Steelers that I found factually insupportable. I do my own grocery shopping. I beat a twenty-six-year-old named DarkKnight99 at chess online last Thursday. The only thing wrong with me, physically speaking, is my right eye, which is glass, which is my own business, and which I have carried around in my skull since a lathe accident in 1971 with ...
Weekly Contest #349
The door wasn't listening to me. This happens a lot since the collapse, but usually it's people."C.H.L.O.E., I am telling you, with biological sincerity, that my retina is here." I pressed my face against the scanner again. The blue light swept across my eye like it checked produce at a grocery store. A grocery store that no longer existed."Retinal profile: unregistered. Svalbard-Beta requires Dual-Imprint Biological Synchronization for vault access. Please locate your co-registrant.""I don't have a co-registrant," I said, to a door. "That's...
Weekly Contest #348
The envelope arrived on a Wednesday, because nothing that destroys a life begins on a Friday.Vincent Collins found it on his welcome mat at 7:14 in the morning, positioned with deliberate precision, its cream-colored edges lining up neatly with the doorframe. No postage. No return address. The paper stock was heavy, expensive, the kind of stationery that announced its importance through texture alone. The font on the front, a severe sans-serif that spelled out his name and address, looked government-adjacent. Official without being identifia...
Weekly Contest #347
The readout on the handlebar said 15.2 mph, and Adam watched it the way a man watches a wound that hasn't clotted.Eighteen hours. He knew it by the tendons in his thighs, which had stopped burning six hours ago and were now doing something quieter and more permanent. He knew it by the IV line taped to the inside of his elbow, the tape edges darkened with old sweat. He knew it by the way his lower back had simply given up registering pain and had moved on to a dull, mineral absence, like a tooth gone dead at the root.The room was ten feet wid...
Weekly Contest #346
The organ had stopped three seconds before Michael Farren arrived, and the silence that replaced it was the kind that pressed against the ears like something solid.He stood in the rear vestibule, one hand braced against a pillar, breathing through the nausea that always followed transit. The smell hit him first: chrysanthemums, furniture polish, and beneath those, the faint chemical sweetness of preservation. October sun came sideways through amber glass, laying gold across the pews and the dark shoulders of the mourners.Ninety people, maybe...
Weekly Contest #345
Leonard Morrow fed the rejection letters into the coal grate one at a time. He did not burn them in a bundle. Each one deserved its own small death. The paper curled and blackened, and the words of the editors vanished into orange light. We regret to inform you. Not suitable for our list. The reading public requires stories of a more conventional nature.The flat was cold despite the fire. Coal dust filmed the windowsill and the stack of foolscap on the desk and the teacup Heather had left that morning, still half full. Leonard watched the la...
Weekly Contest #344
I never wanted the money. I only wanted the miracle he promised me would happen if I forced his hand.People will say I sold him. They will say I was greedy, that I counted coins while he counted souls. They were not there the afternoon a centurion beat old Matthias in the street until the dust around them turned dark.Yeshua knelt beside the old man after the soldiers moved on. He pressed his hands to the wounds, and the bleeding stopped. I watched it happen. The skin closed under his fingers. Matthias wept against Yeshua's chest and breathed...
Weekly Contest #343
The envelope sat on the kitchen table like a landmine wrapped in paper, gathering dust but losing none of its danger.Samuel had placed it there eleven months ago, the day after the funeral, and had not touched it since. Iris's handwriting covered the front. He recognized the shape of his name in her slanted letters the way a man recognizes a face without knowing its bones. The rest of the words he could not read. He had never been able to read.Seventy years he had carried the secret. He'd built houses, framed roofs, cut dovetail joints so ti...
Weekly Contest #342
She was the size of his hand, and his hands had never felt more useless.Mario Chiara sat in the plastic chair beside Incubator 7, his steel-toed boots still gray with drywall dust. The NICU hummed around him. Ventilators wheezed. Monitors clicked their steady count. The air tasted like alcohol and something sharper, something chemical that caught in the back of his throat when he breathed.Eleven forty-seven at night. He had been sitting for seven hours.His daughter lay under blue lights that made her skin look purple. Wires snaked from patch...
Weekly Contest #341
The Circle K clerk’s eyes were iridescent moth wings, and he was weighing my voice in a tiny jeweler’s scale.The device sat on the Formica counter between a display of beef jerky and a tray of stale donuts. It was brass, old, and tarnished. One pan held a small lead weight; the other held nothing but the vibration of the word I had just spoken. The needle trembled in the center."Heavy," the clerk said. His nametag read Hollis. He did not blink. The shifting patterns in his irises swirled in violet and gold. "Heavier than fifteen years ago, J...
Weekly Contest #340
The floorboards pressed hard against my rib cage. I did not move. To move was to make sound, and sound was death. Above me, the boy’s heart hammered against the mattress slats. I ran my tongue over my serrated teeth, a wet, slick sound in the silence.But mostly I read the room in heat. The corner by the window was cold… a blue cold that pulled warmth from my nose. The spot where the Small One’s feet dangled over the bed edge was red-warm, pulsing with his quick blood. The blood drops on the floor from three nights ago, when the Tall Man had ...
Weekly Contest #339
There should’ve been two spoons in the drawer. But there was only her note, and half a cup of golden liquid that shimmered like remembered sunlight. Eat this, it said. We’ll start again.Thom Peck stared at the handwriting. The loops on the ‘g’ were wide and erratic. Nina wrote the way she planted her garden. She ignored the lines.He closed the drawer. Then he opened it again.The kitchen was clean. It was too clean. For three weeks, Thom had moved through the rooms of the house with a roll of heavy-duty tape and a stack of flattened cardboard...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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 ...
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