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Weekly Contest #196
I have relived this day a thousand times, and it always starts the same way: with the hiss of the coffee machine piercing the silence.At 5.45AM in summer the kitchen was already light. Since returning to work after maternity leave, I’d been getting up increasingly earlier each morning, in an attempt to grab a moment of stillness before the day began and everyone else’s needs started pulling at me.Sun filtered through the curtains, illuminating the living room and the debris left from our children sweeping through.Beside the couch was Thomas’...
Shortlisted for Contest #180 ⭐️
If you are reading this, then you must want to know what happened. I’ll try to explain, so you can understand.This is a story which could have gone many ways, but it went this way.It began at a house. The house was very beautiful. It was large and white and had pillars either side of the front door, more like some monument than a home. There were strings of lights hanging from the trees, moons in a moonless night.I stood with Isabella at the end of the driveway, which was wide and long and edged with squared off hedges. I’d never been inside...
Shortlisted for Contest #164 ⭐️
CW: Child lossMy husband had warned me Josh Carter was back. Still when I came out of the supermarket and saw him, the shock of it stopped me.I stood frozen with a bag hanging from each hand, people parting around me. He was almost exactly as I remembered him. The same dark hair, the same swinging stride.I knew without having to think how old he was. Twenty-two next month. Just like Ryan would have been. Their birthdays were three weeks apart and I always used to make a cake for Josh too, because I knew his own mother wouldn’t.He didn’t see ...
Shortlisted for Contest #158 ⭐️
I came to this beach as a child, but that was before any of the bad things which would happen had happened, so it was another world. My parents smoking and arguing in the front seat as they searched for a park, me and my brothers jostling for space in the back, the scent of coconut lotion on my arms.As an adult, here in the night, it was a different place. Black water under a black sky. The car park emptied out, the tip of the cigarette glowing in the darkness of the car. “Here,” the man in the passenger seat said, passing it to me. I t...
Weekly Contest #155
There were three good things about working graveyard shift. One was the drunks who came in and paid cash for their late-night energy drinks and snacks and didn’t notice him short changing them. A dollar here and there, it all added up. It didn’t even feel like stealing.It was for his boy, after all. Jamie had school sports and school trips and the good kind of shoes no one would give him shit for. His son deserved it more than those who had enough they didn’t count it to the last dollar.It was five in the morning, the slow hour crawling...
Winner of Weekly Contest #151 🏆
The summer I turned sixteen and got my license, Kyle Lewis was pulled dead from the lake. It was the week before Christmas and heat pressed down over the town. People went to the lake to cool off, but Kyle didn’t drown. There was no water in his lungs.Coming back now, ten years passed, like always when I returned to visit my parents, I found myself slowing down when I reached the lake. The turn off was on the long road which led to their house and then on into town, and I felt myself pulled toward it, as if a magnet lay in the deep centre of...
Weekly Contest #146
He’s not like all the others, he’s different. That’s what my mother told me. But she said that about the others too.The day I met him he walked into the kitchen as I ate my breakfast, his boots heavy on the vinyl floor. He filled up the doorway, blotted out the sun.“Connor, this is Shane,” she said.I looked up at him, saw the shaved head and tattoos circling his neck in a dark ring, like something strangling him.He came into the kitchen and put his hand toward me, like I was a man instead of only twelve. I could see the muscles standing up i...
Weekly Contest #142
There’s this photo in the hallway I can’t stop looking at. My mother sat astride a golden horse with a blue ribbon pinned to the bridle, her hair the same yellow as the horses. It’s hung in a wooden frame, the colours faded behind glass.My mother was nineteen years old, the same age as I am now. She’s not smiling yet she seems happy, a serene and satisfied look as if she had all she needed in this world. The horse’s name was Rain and she was ten years old. I was inside my mother still, buried deep, not yet conceived.XXXMy moth...
Shortlisted for Contest #137 ⭐️
Ava parked in the dark space between streetlights, under the shadow of a tree. She looked across the road at her sister’s house and saw the light spilling from the bare kitchen window, casting a ghostly rectangle across the lawn.“Just act like everything is normal,” she’d said to Annemarie. “Make him something nice for dinner and crush a sleeping pill into it. Make sure he has a whiskey with it.”Don’t you remember, she could have added.She left the ignition running and the vapor from the exhaust floated like mist around the car. Hands ready ...
Shortlisted for Contest #134 ⭐️
Six weeks after his father left, the first postcard came from him. “A postcard,” his mother said. “Where’s the return address? Where’s the goddamn cheque?”The postcard read Greetings from Perth in a swirling printed cursive. That was all the address they got. Three months after that they moved out of their house and went to live by the graveyard. At night he kept watch through the gaps in the metal slats of his blinds. He could see the high steel gate black and gleaming in the glow from the streetlight, a shadow falling all th...
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