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Weekly Contest #152
“I can see it now.”The voice of the man on the radio was very familiar to the boy, even though he had never met the man. He spoke loudly, always just below a yell, and he used a lot of words that the boy didn’t understand. He spoke with an energy that made the boy feel nervous, like there lurked some danger around the next bend in the road, just out of sight. Papa seemed to like him though. He always listened to him in the car on these long rides. “I can see it. A nation of coddled, man-children. Of course, I’m not supposed to say that....
Weekly Contest #99
At one point, the rising sun had meant something. The thin amber blade slicing out of a dark horizon signalled the dawn of a new day. A definitive end to yesterday. An end to a night plagued by danger and mystery. A new beginning. Once, it had meant those things. Now, amid the streetlamps flickering down over a slew of noisy traffic, the sun seemed nothing more than a late arriving guest to a day already in progress. Few passersby even seemed to notice the burgeoning hill of light, just now barely visible at the end of the narrow corridor of...
Shortlisted for Contest #70 ⭐️
In the White House there are an estimated 132 rooms. Of course, estimated is a bit of a misnomer. Certainly there is some precise number for which it is true to say: “That’s how many rooms are in the White House”. Officially, that number is one hundred and thirty two. Some of the rooms we know, like the Oval Office, or the Situation Room. Stately rooms. Nameworthy rooms. Another thirty five are bathrooms apparently, if you believe the official figures. Seems like a lot, doesn’t it? The Taj Mahal’s only got eleven. But I’m sure the government...
Weekly Contest #69
At last, a rider in the rain. A silhouetted shadow riding hard against the hell that seemed to pour in from all angles, the hooded rider bent hard forward, nearly flush against the horse’s back. One rider where there ought be three. A bad omen, surely. The beast’s hooves thundered into the wet ground, deaf against the heaviness of the rain, sending up clods of mud and earth up to meet in defiance of the rain falling down. A voice called out and the gates to the fort creaked open, just wide enough that the rider’s cloak flicked at the wooden ...
Weekly Contest #68
This was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives. For Ariel, that was certainly true. She looked down at the sleeping baby that lay on her chest and felt another surge of maternal love pulse through her. She put a hand on her child’s downy hair. Sweet Dorothy. It made her want to weep and scream and shout with how viscerally she loved this girl. How could she have made something so perfect? The sweat and stench of labour, the underlying pungent sterility of the hospital, it all seemed to fade away now that this beautiful child had arr...
Weekly Contest #64
1854 Albert hitched the wagon to the makeshift post that had been set up out in front of the house before coming round to help his wife step down out of the carriage. She squeezed his arm tightly with her right hand, her left resting defensively around her swollen belly. Her feet crunched against the dry earth and her head swam for a moment with the change in posture. She felt the baby kick, sensing the instability, and she gripped Albert’s arm tighter until the moment passed. She looked out into the cornfields and took a deep breath of the ...
Weekly Contest #63
By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. The trailer door clanged loudly behind me, but I tried to ignore it as I looked up at the trees around me. Deep, opulent red swatches, blending into golden, iridescent ambers. The colours mixed and blended, not only between trees but within single leaves, waving and roiling in the air like the very heart of nature itself was on fire. Evergreen trees sat dappled throughout, providing a counterpoint to the symphony of autumnal change that danced around them. They were stalwart, indifferen...
Weekly Contest #62
The cabin was eerily quiet despite how crowded it was, but this was typical for divinings. The silence seemed to seep in through the big bay windows as if the stillness of space muffled anything that anyone might want to say. But the truth is, they didn’t want to say anything. They were there to bear witness. They just wanted to see if maybe this would be the historic divining. The last one. There was a quiet, religious reverence to the room as Ludwig approached the sphere which sat elevated near the captain’s station. No one looked directly...
Weekly Contest #61
The Man was grateful to find the cave, tucked low into the cliff face, as the skies outside hastened to darken and the wind began to pull at their tattered clothes. The ocean battered hard against the nearby rocks, sending spray up into the air to meet the rain before the wind caught them both, sea and sky, and whipped them hard against the Man and the Boy, each droplet a lash against their exposed faces. The Man hurried the Boy into the cave, shaking water from his clothes forcefully, trying to hide the way his body tremored. He didn’t know...
Weekly Contest #60
I close my eyes and try to slow my heart rate, like I read the snipers used to do in war. Still do, maybe, if there’s anyone out there fighting… Focus, damnit. My hands keep shaking, so I steady my forearms on an unbroken stretch of fence. Bullets are nearly as scarce as food, and I think I’m on my last shot. I can’t remember how to open the damn gun to check. I focus my eyes on my target in front of me. The peacock takes a few cautious steps forward, pecking at little little specks of dirt and grass peeking up through the gravel path. His l...
Weekly Contest #59
Molly gazed out the window at the lunar expanse as the shuttle rattled its way down to the surface. She’d seen thousands of pictures of the colony in the months leading to her exodus, but somehow none captured how grey it was. It wasn’t monotonous, certainly. The cratered face of the moon provided texture, from shadowed blacks at the crater depths, to dirt peaks which looked almost eggshell white under the harsh lights surrounding the landing pad. Even the dome ahead loomed as a dull grey protrusion, an ugly grey eyeball with just a narrow p...
Weekly Contest #58
The marshal came by again this afternoon. Rolled up in his big government truck when I was out back, digging. Didn’t hear him pulling in till Daisy ran out barking, you know how she is. Must’ve spooked him, ‘cause the Marshall waited till I calmed Daisy down to get out and start telling me how the fire’s getting closer, like I ain’t got half a brain to figure that out for myself. Like my throat doesn’t choke at the smoke, like my own eyes can’t see the damn smoke clouds rolling in, underlit by the fire till they glow red like some halfway He...
Weekly Contest #57
August 31, 1977 In an empty room deep in the belly of the Physics department at Cornell University, a coffee mug balances precariously above a panel of electronics. The panel is at least as twice as complicated as it looks, whereas the mug is quite the opposite: a relatively ordinary thing. It is a small, blue mug with a large NASA insignia across the side. Earlier this morning the mug contained its usual contents - coffee, black, eight sugars - but now it is empty. The cup belongs to one Phillip Baumgartner, astrophysicist extraordinaire...
Weekly Contest #56
I found her note while hiking. It was just as I had sat on a stone off the main trail, stopping for a drink and a chance to listen to the forest without my footsteps. I had come to the forest to lose myself, and was growing frustrated at how relentlessly that self followed anyway. I’d just finished my water, and was cursing myself for having not brought enough. As I took my rag and wiped the sweat from my face I saw a glisten of light reflected from under a set of ferns nearby, daring me not to notice it. I walked over and picked it up. A sl...
Weekly Contest #55
Throughout history, an untold number of people have predicted the end of the world. Big names too. Hippolytus of Rome predicted the world would end in the year 500CE. Christopher Columbus figured it would happen around 1656. Charles Manson tried his best to bring it about himself in 1969. Perhaps most famously, in the sixteenth century Nostradamus, the man known by his contemporaries as the much more ordinary Michele de Nostredame, in his famous quatrain X.72 made a very distant but specific prediction: the world would end in July, 1999. Inv...
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