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Weekly Contest #357
For five years, the title of "The Baby" was mine. I had the papers to prove it: a registration certificate from the kennel club and the undisputed evidence of being coddled, cooed at, and constantly photographed. Then they brought home the usurper, a creature whose only discernible talent was screaming at a pitch that curdled my kibble.Let me paint you a picture of the "Before Times".Mark threw the ball with authority. The man had form. A proper windup, a grunt of effort, and the thing sailed past the oak tree and into the far corner of the ...
Weekly Contest #356
He sat on the arm of my leather chair, working his claws through the grain with the focus of a surgeon and the remorse of a parking ticket. I'd filled the bottle with water and a splash of lemon juice because I'd read online that cats hate citrus. Sullivan apparently skipped that article. He looked up, blinked once, and went back to the destruction."That's a four-hundred-dollar chair," I told him.Sullivan pulled a strip of leather free and dropped it on the rug like a trophy.My name is Danny Pryor. I write gritty, meticulously composed thril...
Weekly Contest #355
The Carver twins had been swapping places since before they had language for deception, and now, at their father's funeral, they would perform their most dangerous switch yet, because one of them had killed him, and even they weren't sure which.Ward (or the one wearing Ward's tie) shook hands near the lilies. His grip was warm, practiced, the kind of grip their father had once graded on a five-point scale in a notebook neither son had been allowed to read. Outside the tall windows, the lake held its sheet of ice without comment. A radiator t...
Weekly Contest #354
It was beautiful, and Eric hated himself for thinking so, hated the way the magma flowering across the Pacific looked like the roses he used to steal from gas stations for women who deserved better than stolen roses and better than him.He was forty minutes into ascent. The viewport framed a planet coming undone. Orange seams. A smear of cloud the color of a bruise turning yellow at its edges. Somewhere under that, a federal prison he had walked out of six hours ago was no longer a federal prison. It was slag and running iron and whatever a m...
Weekly Contest #352
Her daughter had never seen color. She had never been taught what amber was. So someone needed to explain to Nessa Galloway why every crayon in Isla's box was worn to a nub, every single color, except the gray one, which had never been touched. Not once. Not ever. As if the child already knew the world had enough of that.Isla sat on the floor, working on something new. Her tongue poked out the side of her mouth the way it always did when she concentrated. The drawing was facing away from Nessa, but she could see the movements: deliberate, ar...
Weekly Contest #351
Victor spent his life trying to become God. Someone else has found his notes. She is considerably more competent, and that is the most frightening thing I have encountered in thirty years of being frightening.Edinburgh in October, 1823, past eleven o'clock on a Wednesday, and I am standing outside a converted warehouse in the rain with a torn page from The Edinburgh Journal of Natural Philosophy going soft in my palm. The ink is running. I have read the article sixteen times since Aberdeen. I could recite the methodology backwards.The author...
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...
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