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Weekly Contest #375
My mother believed death announced itself three times. Not because it was merciful, she said, but because people were stubborn. The first warning could be dismissed as coincidence. The second could be blamed on nerves. By the third, you were choosing not to understand. Simone and I grew up with dozens of her rules woven into ordinary life so tightly that I stopped noticing how strange they were until I left home. Never sweep beneath someone's feet unless you wanted them to remain unmarried. Never answer your name if you heard it called from ...
The first thing wrong with Tuesday was the rain, although Mara Vale would later understand that the rain was one of the few things that had happened exactly as it should. She noticed it at 7:16am that morning when she stepped out of Number 18 wearing a blue dress and found Bellweather moving beneath umbrellas. Rain struck the pavement hard enough to mist around people's ankles, and Mara retreated beneath the awning before it ruined her suede heels. She checked her phone. Rain until noon, high of sixty-one. She refreshed the forecast twice, i...
Weekly Contest #374
The first thing I noticed was that the woman in the photograph had my face. Not a resemblance I had to squint at or convince myself was there because we shared the same complexion. She had my eyes, the narrow bridge of my nose and the little dip in my upper lip. Her hair was longer than mine, pressed straight and curled beneath her chin in a style that looked unmistakably early-2000s, but everything underneath it belonged to me. I was twenty-two years old, four days away from graduating from Bellamy University, standing on a folding chair in...
My next-door neighbor, Simone, has always been a very sweet woman. She brought pound cake the afternoon Daniel and I moved in. Everyone else brought wine. Simone came across the lawn carrying a loaf pan beneath a dish towel. Daniel was upstairs arguing with a mover about a scratch in our dresser, so I stood at the kitchen counter and ate a piece with my fingers while she watched. She asked what I thought. I told her it was perfect, and she laughed because we both knew it wasn’t. “You’re a terrible liar for a chef,” she said, and then she too...
The first thing Anna asked for after nineteen days in a coma was water, and Mom cried as if she had said something extraordinary. She had been asleep beside the bed with her glasses low on her nose and a paperback facedown against her chest, one hand resting near Anna’s hip. Dad had gone downstairs for coffee after draping his jacket over Mom’s legs, though she had complained twice that the room was too warm. I stood near the window eating pretzels from the vending machine when Anna made the small sound that became water. Mom was awake befor...
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