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Weekly Contest #291
Mark Holden’s fingers trembled above the ancient Remington typewriter, hovering like pale moths uncertain where to land. The rejection email glowed on his laptop screen—the fifth this month, thirty-second this year. “Thank you for your submission to The Weekly Wordsmith,” the email read. “While your story showed promise, we have selected another entry as this week’s winner.” Promise. Always promise. Never triumph. Mark dragged his palm across three days of stubble and reached for his cold, bitter coffee. Bookshelves bowed under writing manua...
Weekly Contest #287
Steam curled from the kettle’s spout, a ghostly ribbon dancing in the dim morning light. Orion Carter traced its path with failing eyes, remembering how he once tracked the trajectories of distant comets with that same careful attention. The familiar ritual of making tea had become a treacherous dance, his fingers seeking the counter’s edge, measuring distances by memory rather than sight. The kettle’s whistle pierced the quiet apartment. He reached for it, muscle memory betraying him as his hand missed the handle and brushed against the sca...
Weekly Contest #286
Dawn seeped through the library’s arched windows, the light transforming the silence into something sacred. Samuel traced the leather spine beneath his weathered fingers, each crack and imperfection as familiar as the lines on his own palm. The gilt letters caught the light, flaring like captured fire, while shadows from the iron shelving cast prison-bar patterns across the floor. In twenty-three years of cataloging books, he had never felt time’s presence so keenly, had never heard the tick of the wall clock echo with such merciless precisi...
Weekly Contest #285
In the dying light of December 31st, 1999, Sarah Morgan stood before her basement shelves, counting cans of preserved peaches for the seventh time that day. The amber-hued fruit floated in glass tombs, distorted and strange in the fluorescent light that hummed overhead like an electric dirge. Her fingers, pale and trembling, traced the dates she’d meticulously written on each label – expiration dates that might outlive civilization itself. The basement air hung thick with the musty breath of concrete and fear. Stacked against the walls, jugs...
[Frank’s living room, 11:45 PM, December 31, 1999] “Gary, pick up, you magnificent bastard!” The plastic receiver digs into my ear like a cheap headset at a telemarketing firm. My living room looks like a refugee camp designed by a doomsday prepper with a serious bean addiction. Towers of pork and beans wobble precariously, threatening to topple like a Jenga tower built by a toddler. D-cell batteries scatter across the coffee table like metallic confetti, and duct tape creeps up the walls like silver kudzu. The emergency radio I bought at Ra...
Weekly Contest #284
The boutique hummed with the frenetic energy of post-Christmas sales. Shoppers jostled for space, arms laden with discounted luxury goods, their voices blending into a discordant symphony of complaints and excitement. Sarah Jensen stood behind the counter, her forced smile threatening to crack under the weight of another 12-hour shift. Her reflection in the glass display case stared back at her—a pale, tired face framed by hair that refused to cooperate despite the expensive products she used. “Miss! Excuse me, miss!” a sharp voice cut throu...
Weekly Contest #283
Thomas Green shuffled through the snow-laden streets on Christmas Eve, his weathered hands clutching a worn songbook. Each gust of wind seemed to whisper memories of better days, when his voice rang strong and clear through these very streets. Now, at seventy-eight, his once-resonant baritone had faded to a trembling whisper, but his determination to continue his decades-long tradition of caroling remained unshaken. The town had changed. Where festive lights once turned night into day, darkness now reigned. Thomas adjusted his threadbare sca...
Weekly Contest #281
The Christmas lights cast dancing shadows across the living room walls as Daniel nursed his third glass of wine, watching the party unfold from his corner sanctuary. His notebook lay open on his lap, its pages as blank as they’d been for the past eight months. Even here, at Sarah’s annual Christmas gathering, he couldn’t escape the crushing weight of his writer’s block. “Still hiding in corners, Dan?” Sarah appeared beside him, her emerald cocktail dress catching the light. “You know, the whole point of a party is to actually interact with p...
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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