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Weekly Contest #359
TOO EARLY FOR HALOES Winter in New York City. 1949, late day. It had been raining and would no doubt soon rain again. A painter would have been making good use of his Payne’s Grey. He would be eyeing his verticals and dimensional planes. He would wish there weren’t so many cars, and he would paint the street that way—empty, shiny, with a drizzle on all the windows. He would be awaiting the streetlamps because every lamp would have its very paintable halo—but it was still too early for haloes. Winter in New York can be bone-chillingly cold....
Weekly Contest #322
“A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” Marcus Aurelius said that. Marcus Aurelius, of course, was a dick. That is, he was a pretty smart dick, but he was emperor of Rome, and none of those guys were all that great. Being emperor means you say a thing and bingo! it’s the truth. What about us poor sods who have no ambition? No ambition that an emperor would call ambition, anyway. My main ambition today is to wake up tomorrow still alive. I’ll have the same ambition tomorrow, unless I die tonight, which I probably won’t. When the onco...
Weekly Contest #294
[Some folks might be sensitive to a relationship that goes where it shouldn't. But then, that's kind of the point...]“Just say the word,” Uncle Randall tells me, with all the weight of his judgeship behind him—but something stops me. I know he has the power; I’m confident that he can help me put a certain creep behind bars, if he thinks I want him to. And as a budding prosecutor, of course I want him to. But something stops me. I mean, something besides asking my uncle to do—just for me—a quasi-legal thing.Uncle Randall is what people winkin...
Weekly Contest #253
ON BOA CONSTRICTORS, TOWELS, AND PROUST Look at the time! The sun’s up and I’m not! Good God, and my to-do list is longer than a boa constrictor—at least I think they’re pretty long—but I should Google it, because then I’d know how long boa constrictors are—not that I really care, but still, now that I’ve wondered about it—and knowledge is power— No no no, step away from the computer. Some kinds of knowledge are just a waste of time. Anyway, I promise we can look up length of boa constrictors tonight or on the weekend, b...
Weekly Contest #230
MOTHS Ben walks in the night—with the night, as with a friend. The moths don’t bother Ben, though they cloud the streetlights like kinetic haloes. Stray dogs, broken glass, cigarette butts don’t bother him, nor the tatters of paper that blow against his pant legs and cling there. Nothing bothers Ben. Not even the children who smoke and inject in shadowed doorways. Ben’s heart is light as a feather tonight. If he died right now, the guardian at the holy gate would put his heart in one pan and a feather in the other and fi...
Weekly Contest #213
The Directions of Your Heart Before killing myself, methods of which I’d been devising in my jumbled mind for several weeks, I decided to consult a professional. Not a professional in self-destruction—I didn’t think I even needed one, since my ideas of how to end my life had been predictably creative—but one of those people trained in what’s optimistically called Mental Health. I couldn’t afford a real one; I had to depend on what I could get from government assistance, so my expectations weren’t high. But when I walked into the off...
Weekly Contest #192
I will tell you what it’s like to dream of a long-dead child—though of course there are as many ways to dream as there are people to do it, and far more than that. You have come back to a house where you once lived. You sold this house years ago, and other people have been living in it, but now you have returned. Returned to see the evidence of their neglect, which is everywhere. Your dreaming eyes take in travesty after travesty: A pile of rotting leaves in the sink your husband worked so hard to install. Turds, human and canine, on the mo...
Shortlisted for Contest #190 ⭐️
I believe some people are sensitive about mindless promiscuity, even a single sentence of it. The year was 1939, in the merry month of May, and New York City was preparing itself to deliver what some hoped might be its favorite character. St. Vincent’s Hospital was the venue of choice—right in the heart of Greenwich Village, where the competition for created characters was fierce. And sure enough, here she came, though not as quickly or effortlessly as would have been ideal. Alicia, with four syllables, after a popular Russian ballerina ...
ONCE AGAIN, FROM MEMORY “Did you remember your fingerpicks?” “Yes.” “Flatpicks?” “Yes.” “Capo?” “Yes.” “Set list?” “YES!” “You don’t need to get mad.” “I’m not exactly mad.” “You look exceedingly mad to me.” “I’m just annoyed that you’re bothering me with all these questions.” “Because every time we get to the gig, you turn out to have forgotten something, and I have to go back for it.” “That was the old me. I used to.” “Last week you did.” “What, are you keeping a record?” “It’s not that hard for me to rem...
Shortlisted for Contest #188 ⭐️
SIX LETTERS OF ILLUMINATION I didn’t really think much about happiness until I had the opportunity, in a Scrabble game, of adding ‘piness’ to the existent ‘hap’. Indeed, the act of putting ‘piness’ on the board would have brought happiness to almost anyone, and it certainly made my opponent’s day, my opponent being my fifteen-year-old nephew. “Piness! Ha ha ha!” The very fact of my playing Scrabble at all is an indicator of the indescribable ennui in which I normally wallow; though most people play—at least claim to play—Scrabble fo...
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