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Weekly Contest #366
The clock on the wall behind Doctor Friend's desk had stopped. I noticed it the moment I sat down, the way you notice things that confirm what you already know. Time is a lie that the living tell themselves. Tick tock. The hands frozen at 3:03. "How are you feeling today, Sam?" Friend looked older than his thirty-five years. His hair had receded early and gone grey, and those deep brown eyes tracked me as I settled into the chair on the opposite side of his antique mahogany desk. The kind of man who would stare at his own reflection in the m...
Weekly Contest #365
Mara learned early that the fastest way to ruin your life was to let other people tell your story.By ten, she already knew the shape of hers as Eldridge told it.“She let it out,” they whispered. “That’s what happened up at the Harren farm. Her fault. Her blood.”They lowered their voices when she passed, but the words still found their way to her. That’s the Hawthorn girl, some said. That’s the one who lost control.The official record said: Containment Failure, Class Red, Harren Property. Eight fatalities.The unofficial record—the one people ...
Weekly Contest #341
My Love,Rike of Brambleford, a hired blade came into the tavern at dusk, same grin he wore back when I was a squire and he was earning his coin gutting smugglers in the marshlands east of Derwick.They used men like him for that sort of work. Places where you didn’t want survivors or records. Townships too poor to bribe but too loud to ignore. He’d ride in laughing, and the next day the counting would start; fathers, sons, sometimes whole families, depending how drunk they were when the work began.He hadn’t changed. Same gait. Same habit of t...
Weekly Contest #329
Haunted by LoveA baby’s cry. Slipping through the chink where the shutters do not quite meet. It threads the rafters, gathers in the corners, grows until it fills the cabin like smoke. I sit at the table, hands wrapped around an empty cup, and wait for it to fade. It never does quickly. Grief doesn’t, I’ve learned. It lingers, like damp in stone. The fire on the hearth is low. It never quite remembers when it began. Some nights I cannot recall laying in the wood. Yet there it burns, sullen and begrudging, as if offended by its own persisten...
Weekly Contest #324
50 YearsHe stood at the edge of the pier, staring at the water.The sea was calm tonight, almost kind. It had taken so much, and yet it still came back—again and again—like someone who didn’t know how to stop loving.The gulls had gone quiet. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The air smelled of salt and roses, faint as a memory.Thomas rested his hands on the railing. The wood was swollen from rain, cold beneath his fingers. He’d come every night since she died. Not for prayer, not for peace. Just to listen. The sea spoke in a language h...
Weekly Contest #323
Day One“Come back,” she whispered.I opened my eyes to the taste of river silt and candle smoke.Cold stone kissed the back of my skull, and a breath I didn’t remember taking burned up my throat as if I’d swallowed an ember. For a long moment I only listened—to the wind fingering the gaps in the walls, to the river murmuring along the outer wall.“I remember the spear,” I said at last. “The mud.” My tongue felt thick, my throat raw with river. “Dying.”The sound of it startled her; the tremor of her hands betrayed what the voice tried to hide.“W...
Weekly Contest #320
Eleven YearsDetective Corven Ash rang his wife when his Land Cruiser bogged on the Pale Hollow Trail within Ravenspine Forest. He stayed on the line with her for nearly an hour—until he suddenly said, “Oh…shit,” and the line went dead. Despite extensive searches, not a single trace of him has ever been found. No body, no phone, no sign of struggle. It’s as if he stepped off the map.This is his story.I wasn’t on the roster. Two days’ leave left, a weekend promising nothing but sleep and the smell of Mara’s hair in the morning. But the cold-ca...
Weekly Contest #317
Day 63They give me a new world.A small blue stone, river-veined and cloud-bright, threaded by one pale moon. The comet is already visible in the observatory mirrors, a chalk mark scrawled across the firmament. Trajectory holds. Impact in sixty-three rotations.Routine mission: survey, catalogue, keep the ledger. I sign my name where signatures go, accept the seal, and step through the gate.The portal opens on a river bend.The water is winter-cold, iron-clear. The air smells of smoke from peat fires and the sharp green of frost-bitten nettles....
Weekly Contest #316
The manor had no windows left, only holes like blackened teeth. Wind prowled through them and carried whispers down the corridors, though no one dared live there. And yet, on the eve of Saint’s Vigil, they gathered. Madame Irelle arranged her candles with the patience of a surgeon setting his tools. Each flame bent low as if unwilling to burn, though she coaxed them upright with muttered words. The chalk circle was already drawn—symbols etched on stone that should not have held their shape so long. Ser Aldric watched with arms folded, jaw se...
Weekly Contest #314
No one really saw the boy arrive. He wasn’t born in the village, and none of the old women recalled his mother waddling swollen with him through the market stalls or moaning in the birthing hut. Yet one day, as the sun carved its way across a cloudless sky, he appeared beside the cracked fountain in the square. Barefoot. Dusty. Eating a peach. He said his name was Lyre. When asked whose son he was, he shrugged. When asked where he came from, he looked up. "Where the sky broke," he said. "Past the line of trees. Beyond the bones." That summer...
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