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Weekly Contest #372
The clock said 3:11, and Vincent was awake to see it.Seventy-two hours. Give or take. By the second night he wasn't counting anymore, too busy trying to ignore the way the shadows seemed to lean toward him.Down the hall his father breathed, a wet rattle in, a long whistle out. That was the sound the house ran on now. Nicholas Pierce, seventy-one, lungs full of what the doctors called progression.The third pot of the night sat cold beside him. Around one, his heart had fluttered, a fish turning under ice. He'd blamed the coffee. Lately he bla...
Weekly Contest #371
Graham killed the engine and the world went quiet. Almost quiet. The '93 Dakota still ticked under the hood, cooling, and somewhere behind the laundromat a transformer buzzed like a trapped hornet.3:04 a.m. The dash clock glowed green, working when it felt like it.He sat a minute, hands on the wheel. His lower back throbbed with his pulse, like somebody pressing a thumb into the space below his ribs. Twelve hours at the griddle would do that. He'd sweated through his shirt twice and replaced it with sweet tea, which Doc Ruiz kept telling him...
Weekly Contest #370
The lights died white and came back red."Containment failure," the ceiling said. A woman's recorded voice, calm as a librarian reading a bedtime story. "Thermal purge initiated. Incineration in three minutes. All personnel evacuate Level Six."03:00 lit the blast door's faceplate and began to fall. 02:58. 02:57.Elian was standing before his legs told him anything. That was the trouble with his body. It ran ahead of him, and not only through space.The pull came up through the floor. It always did. A tilt toward yesterday, patient as a tide fin...
Weekly Contest #369
Walt watched from the kitchen window and let his coffee go cold in his fist.Below him, Jacob sat cross-legged in the grass. The dog sat beside him, black and still. Neither moved. The boy's hand lay flat on the dog's back, and both heads turned together, slow, tracking something in the treeline Walt couldn't see.Ten minutes. Not one sound.When Walt was ten, this same yard had been a racetrack. His father's hounds wore ruts in the dirt chasing nothing at all. Jacob sat beside a dog that had never once chased a stick. Walt drained the cold cof...
Weekly Contest #368
Water foamed over the rim of the pot and hissed on the burner. Scalded starch, burnt garlic. Her laptop sat open on the counter to a column of numbers she still hadn't checked. From the living room, a cartoon chase blared, xylophone notes hammering through the wall."I can't," Micky said. His voice was a small, frayed thing. "The nines are wrong."Marla turned from the stove. Her son's pencil was a pale stick in his grip, his knuckles tight. His math worksheet was a field of smudged graphite and angry erasures. On the refrigerator behind him, ...
Weekly Contest #367
I am extremely good in an emergency. This is not a boast, it is a job description, printed on a laminated card I keep in my scrub pocket, right under Universal Precautions and right above Signs of Compassion Fatigue. I have been doing this for nine years. I know how to look at a person bleeding out of somewhere and say, calmly, "You're going to be okay," while doing math in my head about whether that's true.So when Danny came through the back door at 9:40 on a Wednesday, soaked through, though it wasn't raining, I did what I always do. I ass...
Weekly Contest #364
1. I Own Exactly One Lucky ObjectI'm good at exactly three things. Rolling a pie crust thin enough to read a newspaper through. Guessing a bake time within thirty seconds, no timer. And lying to myself about how much either one actually matters.Here's the other thing you should know about me before we start: I don't tell a story straight through, start to finish, all the cards face up. Never have. I let things land when they're ready to land, which means some of what's coming is going to feel like it came out of nowhere, right up until it do...
Weekly Contest #359
She has forty-seven freckles across the bridge of her nose, and I have counted them on seven hundred and twelve separate nights. This is not adoration. This is what I tell myself.The moment she falls asleep is the moment my work begins. I pour through the dark of her flat the way cold air finds the gap beneath a door. No sound or ceremony. Only the threshold of her sleep, and then I am beside her bed, and the contract settles over me like a harness cinched in place.The paralysis takes her promptly tonight. Her chest stops its easy rise. Her ...
Weekly Contest #314
I know Arthur by his smell. Always have. His scent lives in my nose the way sunlight lives in morning grass. Worn flannel that holds decades of Saturday mornings. Old books with their patient, dusty whispers. The gentle soap he uses after his evening shower, clean and honest as rain on hot pavement. This is my master. This is home. But something is wrong. The wrongness started three weeks ago, creeping in like fog under the back door. At first, I thought it was the heat. Summer has teeth this year, and they bite deep. The air hangs thick as ...
Shortlisted for Contest #252 ⭐️
Jack Thompson’s fingers drummed a chaotic symphony against his cluttered desk, surrounded by the remnants of unrelenting perfectionism—crumpled paper mountains, an army of empty coffee cups, and the flickering screen of his laptop displaying the solitary bulwark of his creative struggle: one stubborn sentence. This single line of text, which he revised with the same unyielding dedication some might reserve for disarming a bomb, had been his nemesis and companion for five torturous years. “The sun erupted over the horizon like an overzealous ...
Shortlisted for Contest #246 ⭐️
Once, in the recesses of Josh’s cluttered study—a space so densely populated with crumpled papers and half-finished manuscripts it could have been mistaken for the lair of a particularly literary breed of dragon—a plot of exquisite pettiness took root. Josh, an author whose disposition was as sunny as a thundercloud, and whose success in the literary world was comparable to a lead balloon in an origami competition, harbored a grudge. This was no ordinary grudge; it was an epic, monumental, could-be-the-subject-of-a-Greek-tragedy kind of grud...
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