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Weekly Contest #375
The first video wasn’t much to look at. Wes had filmed it on his phone with a tripod his wife Rachel bought for twenty dollars. He spent most of the video talking about where the superstition came from, or at least where people thought it came from. There were several explanations, which Wes would eventually learn was true of most superstitions. One involved the triangle formed by a ladder leaning against a wall and the idea that walking through it profaned something sacred. Another claimed the association came from ladders used at execution...
Weekly Contest #374
By the time David Hinch got around to cleaning out the basement, the house had already been sold. The closing had taken place three days earlier, and the new owners, a young couple expecting their first child, had agreed to give him until Sunday evening to remove whatever remained of his parents’ belongings. When it had been listed, the entire upstairs had already been cleared out and staged by the realtor, but she had told him to leave the basement alone. His father’s space had been tidy enough to show. The walls were adorned with rustic si...
Weekly Contest #373
Sunlight came through the cheap plastic blinds in narrow bands, one of which had managed to land across his eyes with enough precision that he suspected the universe of doing it on purpose. Corey rolled away and pulled the blanket over his face, determined to sleep until his alarm went off, but something occurred to him just as he was about to drift away. The sun shouldn’t hit his face in the morning. He sat up and looked around his bedroom. The dresser was where it belonged. Two cardboard boxes he hadn’t gotten around to unpacking sat wher...
Weekly Contest #372
Donald Parker pulled away from Columbus and South Water precisely on time, and three minutes later, when he crossed State Street, Friday became Saturday. To him, midnight was like a spell that changed everything. Office buildings stood mostly dark above him, their upper floors disappearing into a hazy sky that reflected enough light back toward the ground to erase the stars. There were still plenty of people around, but they no longer crowded the sidewalks. Cars no longer packed the streets, and the drivers who remained seemed less inclined ...
Weekly Contest #371
What had started as an inconvenience had become a dire need that could no longer be denied without running the risk of catastrophe; Jase Maurits had to piss. He had been seriously considering the logistics and legality of pulling onto the narrow shoulder of I-30 when his headlights hit the blue REST AREA sign, informing him that his salvation was a mere two miles away. He sat forward in the driver’s seat and pressed down on the pedal a bit; the need to shave off even a few seconds seemed increasingly important as the pressure inside him forc...
Weekly Contest #370
Caleb Rourke pulled into his driveway at 10:47 p.m., killed the engine, and sat behind the wheel for a moment enjoying the fact that nobody needed anything from him. It had been that kind of Friday. Three residential lockouts, a broken key buried to the shoulder inside a deadbolt, an apartment manager who needed cylinders changed after an eviction, and a woman who had somehow managed to lock herself out of a running Nissan with her purse, phone, and six-month-old daughter still inside. Caleb had gotten that one open in less than a minute. Th...
Weekly Contest #369
The dice roll of genetics had landed on snake eyes for Paul Monaghan, resulting in a diagnosis that left him feeling betrayed by his own body. He had always had a general distrust of doctors, but the pain in his lower back, which he had previously chalked up to working too hard at the valve factory, had crescendoed one night in March, shortly after his forty-seventh birthday. The emergency room had run a full battery of tests, and the results had come back definitively: PKD. The slow, agonizing growth of what would become giant, belly-disten...
Weekly Contest #368
The old guy had been patting his pockets for long enough that Jared had started to feel embarrassed for him. The waitress stood beside the table holding the black plastic check presenter against her hip, doing her best to politely hide her mounting frustration. “I know I had it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have ordered if I didn’t.” “It’s okay,” she told him. “Take your time.” Jared watched over the rim of his coffee mug from the adjacent booth. The entire scene was playing out three feet to his left. When the man removed his jacket to more tho...
Weekly Contest #367
Garrett Fisk swam back to consciousness into waves of discomfort. His throat was so dry it burned as he swallowed. He tried to lick moisture into his mouth, but his tongue felt like a brick between his teeth. An unfamiliar soreness in his bladder made him instinctively reach beneath the beige, waffle-textured blanket covering him. His hand found tubing taped to the inside of his thigh. A catheter. He pulled his arm back slowly, snagging something that sent a jolt of pain through his hand. An IV port was secured there with transparent tape, ...
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