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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 ...
Weekly 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 ...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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 ...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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 ...
Weekly 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...
Weekly 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...
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