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Weekly Contest #323
They called me the Architect of Nightmares, which was a title I'd earned through eighteen novels and a Bram Stoker Award I kept on the mantle like a trophy buck. Julian Croft. The name alone sold books. But late at night, when the house settled into its creaking silence, I wondered if anyone would buy the stories without it. I was 48 when I created Argent. The Weekly Crucible was nothing. A tin-pot online contest run by some literature graduate student out of Portland, with a fifty-dollar prize and maybe three hundred entrants on a good week...
Weekly Contest #322
Everyone here is betting on victory, but I'm the only one betting on survival. My wife is running this marathon a year after chemo, lungs scarred, knees ruined, a body stitched back from the edge. And I'm standing at the finish line, praying I don't have to watch her lose the gamble she made with her own flesh. The crowd presses against me like hungry animals. Cowbells clatter. Signs wave overhead with names I don't recognize. A father hoists his daughter onto his shoulders so she can see better. The child squeals with delight. Their joy fee...
Weekly Contest #321
My mother collected light for a living, but she never shone any on me. In her darkroom, tucked behind jars of ferricyanide, was a box of negatives marked with her severe script: 'DO NOT DEVELOP.' I cut the string, ready to finally see the darkness she'd hidden. The chemical smell hit me first. Stop bath and fixer, developer and hypo. Scents that belonged to Dorian Vanderman, not to me. I was forty years old and still felt like a trespasser in this sacred space. The red safelight cast everything in blood. Awards lined the shelves like tombsto...
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 ...
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