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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 ...
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...
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