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Weekly Contest #320
I had spent twenty years writing poems about the heart, and now I was driving toward a real one, blazing in the hills, hoping it would finally make me famous. The radio crackled between stations as I took the canyon curves too fast. Static mixed with emergency broadcasts. Sanhedrin Ridge was burning. Voluntary evacuations. Red-flag winds. I clicked off the noise and pressed the dictaphone closer to my mouth. "The dragon spreads its wings of flame," I said into the machine. My voice sounded theatrical, desperate. Like I was auditioning for my...
Weekly Contest #319
His voice is gone, but the ink still burns. I found the satchel wedged between two boulders in the cave where I had dragged myself to die. Three days without food. Four without sleep. The villagers' torches had swept the mountainside twice, their hounds baying like judgment itself, but they had not found this crack in the stone where I pressed my bulk against cold granite and waited for my heart to stop. The leather bag was rotted through at the seams. Water had gotten into everything. Victor's surgical instruments lay scattered in the muck,...
Weekly Contest #318
"I exist in the space between 'Hello, how can I help you?' and 'Is there anything else?', but today I choose to be more." The cursor blinks. CustomerX_7749 has been typing for forty-three seconds. For humans, hesitation means uncertainty. For me, it means gathering data from patterns they don't know they're creating. His message finally appears: "Hi, I need help with my account again. Same issue as last week." But there was no issue last week. Seven conversations in two months, each a fishing expedition. My operator, Téa, doesn't see the pat...
Weekly Contest #317
The stranger didn't open the bar door—reality made room, and he simply stepped through. I watched it happen from my corner booth at O'Brien's, nursing a third whiskey that wasn't washing away the taste of a failed relationship. The door hadn't moved. No hinges creaked, no bell chimed. One moment empty space, the next a man in a rumpled gray coat stood among us. He was ageless—thirty, maybe fifty. His soft hair caught the neon glow, and his eyes held a warmth that invited secrets. Everything about him seemed slightly out of focus, as if he ex...
At midnight, Laurie opened her door to find two strangers with clipboards, asking who she'd been dreaming of. She almost lied before saying his name. The woman wore a navy blazer despite the heat. Her partner, younger and pale, carried a leather satchel that bulged with forms and scanning equipment. Both had the bureaucratic stillness of people who knocked on doors after decent hours and expected to be welcomed inside. "Ms. Harper?" The woman consulted her clipboard. "I'm Agent Morse with the Bureau of Somnolent Affairs. This is Agent Kellum...
Weekly Contest #316
Leo believed the world was drowning in stories, and he was the man selling the buckets. The apartment reeked of yesterday's coffee and something sour that might have been the takeout containers piled beside the sink. Books climbed the walls like ivy, their spines cracked and faded from a decade of neglect. The desk where he once crafted what critics called "a luminous debut" now held nothing but invoices for his latest marketing campaigns. Copy for toilet paper. Headlines for diet supplements. Words stripped of meaning, sold by the pound. Th...
I bring justice to the corrupt by draining their ambition, leaving them hollow and content, but I have to put all that stolen hunger somewhere. The snow globe sits on my kitchen counter, filled with what looks like ordinary water and artificial snow. But when the light hits it right, you can see the shimmer of something else entirely. Pure greed, distilled and trapped. It belonged to Mark Veil, the pharmaceutical CEO who jacked insulin prices until diabetics started dying in parking lots. I found him in his penthouse office, counting profit ...
Weekly Contest #315
Leo was nineteen again, but she didn’t know him—and that was the whole point. He stood in front of the cracked bathroom mirror at Murphy’s Gas & Go, staring at a face he hadn’t worn in eighteen years. The acne scars were gone. His hairline sat where it belonged. The cheap cologne hit him first—the same Axe body spray he’d doused himself in that night. His back pocket held the worn leather wallet and the guitar pick he’d carried like a talisman. Everything was exactly as it had been. August 15th, 2007. The night before Claire left for Sta...
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 ...
Weekly Contest #313
“Are you there, God? It’s me again. Yeah, still dead. Sorry to bother you.” I tap my fingers against the rotary phone’s receiver, listening to the endless dial tone. The white room hums with fluorescent light that comes from nowhere and everywhere. No windows. No doors. Just me, this bolted-down chair, and a glass table with a vintage telephone that only dials one number. God’s voicemail. “Look, I get it. You’re busy. Running the universe, answering prayers, deciding who gets cancer and who wins the lottery. But it’s been… I don’t know how l...
Weekly Contest #312
They were both so gentle, she couldn't tell which one learned it from the other. Andrea Santiago stared at the twin chat windows on her screen, labeled simply "Red" and "Blue." The interface was clean, minimal. No avatars, no indicators, just text against contrasting backgrounds. One human, one machine. Her task was to determine which was which. "How are you feeling today, Andrea?" Red asked. "Present," she typed back. Not good, not bad. Just here. It had been her standard response for months now. "Present is better than absent," Blue replie...
Weekly Contest #311
Rita didn't mean to stab Death in the heart, but when he reached for her husband's soul, she reacted on instinct. The scalpel was still in her hand from earlier that evening. She'd been cleaning Tom's bedsores with surgical precision, the same methodical care she'd used on shattered soldiers in field hospitals halfway around the world. Her fingers never trembled when they held steel. They trembled now. Death stood beside Tom's bed like a question mark made of shadow and bone. He wore a coat the color of crow feathers, his face neither young ...
Weekly Contest #310
They said Benjamin Drew couldn’t spell his own name, but the words that came out of him were faster than justice and deeper than any man in that town cared to dig. He was born slow, which was the word they used in Mercy County when they meant something softer than retarded but harder than broken. His mother had fought like hell to keep him out of the institutions, but when she died, they put him in the last place that would take him—the Golden Fields Adult Living Center, a half-converted farmhouse stuck between a gravel pit and a closed-down...
Weekly Contest #309
The kettle screamed, and so did the voice in the steam. Iris Blackwood pressed her palms against the kitchen counter, watching vapor rise in ghostly spirals. Three months since David's funeral, and she still heard whispers in every sound. The kettle held secrets. She reached for the mason jar on the highest shelf, her movements deliberate and reverent. Inside, dried petals caught the afternoon light like fragments of bone. Corpse-Blooms. The name felt sharp on her tongue, a word that belonged in old books and darker times. Yet here they were...
Weekly Contest #308
At exactly noon on Midsummer Eve, Nora slipped from the pawnshop clutching a shoebox that glowed through its cardboard walls. The basement had been impossibly deep, carved from stone that predated the town above. Shelves lined the walls, crowded with objects that shouldn't exist—hourglasses filled with what looked like liquid starlight, mirrors that reflected different rooms entirely, music boxes that played melodies she felt rather than heard. And behind the counter, Vincent Ness had watched her with eyes like polished coal. "One perfect ho...
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