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Weekly Contest #196
Six-year-old Sannie Johnson knew she wasn’t special. Her mother told her. Her sisters told her. Her uncle told her. The hundreds of people who streamed by the tattered “Homeless” signs she and her mother held everyday told her. That’s why Sannie didn’t think she’d done anything special the day she noticed a dollar bill fall from the purse of a woman wearing a fur coat with a high collar outside the Sapphire Hotel. The woman swept through the hotel entrance, failing to notice the little girl who scurried from the shadows of the alley,...
Weekly Contest #191
Jenny steadied herself with her left hand as she squatted among the rubble. With her right hand, she tried to push aside a slab of siding jammed against the remains of the patio table. She’d taken off her work gloves when the insurance agent stopped by, and then plunged back into the debris, forgetting where she’d set them. With shards of glass covering the ground, she moved cautiously. But she thought she’d seen a familiar bit of red ceramic among the jumble of splintered boards and branches. She kept pushing through bits and pieces. One ...
Weekly Contest #187
The kittens opened their eyes when they heard a new voice in the tent. Over the first weeks of their lives, after their ears had unfurled, they had grown dimly accustomed to the rise and fall of male voices, the quick step of boots in and out of the tent, and the click of the telegraph machine. This new voice, however, was thin and reedy, shrill enough to break through the kittens’ restless sleep. The trio blinked and stirred on their scratchy blanket in the tent’s warmest corner. They looked for their mother, as they had everyday for the ...
Weekly Contest #186
Tick. The second hand on Maya’s watch moves six-tenths of a millimeter to the right, the click of the cogs lost in the space of the cathedral's soaring arches. In that same instant, Maya tips her face to the three celebrated windows gracing the cathedral’s western facade and she breathes in the light. The window in the center is eight meters of radiance forged with hundreds of panes depicting the ascension of Christ into a golden sky. To the left and right, angels glow in serenity and exaltation. Crimson and cobalt shimmer across Maya’s sk...
Weekly Contest #100
I will be sick. There is no way I won’t be sick.You have to eat it. I look down at the bowl. It’s plastic and turquoise. A dull turquoise. Perhaps a sea foam green. It’s hard to tell in the dim light of this street-side comedor. I’m vaguely aware of salsa music playing from a radio. If I could hear it above Tegucigalpa’s groaning and squealing traffic, I may be able to identify the artist. After four months traipsing around Central America, I’m starting to know the music. But none of t...
Weekly Contest #99
Warning: Story includes themes of suicideThe first rays of the July sun flashed off General Burton’s glasses and onto the refrigerator as he applied three drops of lubricant to the slide rails of his Colt .45. One, two, three on one side. One, two, three on the other. Two drops on the barrel. One drop on the engagement lugs. One drop on the interior of the barrel bushing. Re-assemble. His fingers moved over the parts with a command accrued over seven decades. But his arthritic joints and knotted...
Weekly Contest #92
The old grandfather clock, invisible in the darkened dining room, whirred and clunked through its gears just before chiming eleven times. As the last tone faded, the innkeeper heard a creak. This was not the groan of the country house settling. For 42 years, the murmurs and sighs of the aged walls and floors had woven themselves into the innkeeper’s consciousness. She knew those noises as intimately as she knew the pops and clicks of her bones.No, this was the squeak of one Early American floorboard being pushed against a...
Weekly Contest #91
In her final moments of existence, just milliseconds before “Biographies, N-S” snuffs out her life forever, Librarian Boughton manages one final cry.“Murder!”Her two assistants, slogging through the daily shelving over in Fiction, look at each other.“Did you hear something?” asks Matt.Emma glances over her shoulder toward “Biographies”.“I don’t think so. It was probably just the construction.”Matt slides two books into their proper spaces before saying, “Should we go see? Just to make sure?”“She doesn’t like anyone in Biographies. ...
Weekly Contest #90
**Author's note: Please see the note in the Comments for a fact vs. fiction breakdownSavannah, TennesseeApril, 2021I am dying. I do not need to feel the old man’s fingers probing my roots to know. Or his knife stabbing my bark. I do not need to hear the grunts as he shuffles around me shaking his head. Or his final pronouncement to the lady in the floppy hat and long skirt.“Can’t be saved this time, Effie. It’s gotta come down.”The lady dabs her eyes.“Oh, Cal. Are you sure? It’s the last of our Civil War trees.”“I know, I know. Hundred ...
Weekly Contest #80
Author's note: The return of Dr. Ingalls, psychotherapist to historical figures. His first appearance was in "'Tis a Lie!" way back in September (Contest 57), featuring his session with George Washington. In the comments, I'll put a note about what is true and what is fiction in this one.Dr. Ingalls is tapping his pen on his legal pad as he waits for his next client. He looks at his phone. The client is already eight minutes late and Dr. Ingalls underlines the observation he made the previous week.Routinely late for appointments.At...
Weekly Contest #77
A chunky rat was gnawing the remains of a hot dog when he felt the first snowflake drift onto his head. He looked up, his jaw still moving. He was a Miami rat and somehow, in his little rat brain, he knew there was something off about that icy crystal perched on his head. Clamping his teeth around the hot dog, he scurried along the wall of the concession stand, over the sand, past a flip-flopped foot and into the clumps of beachgrass.The owner of the glittered flip flop might have screeched if she hadn’t been holding her phone to the sk...
Weekly Contest #75
I will never eat another apple pie. Never again. I wouldn’t have said that last year or any year before that. But now, the thought of an apple pie shatters me. It started with a Facebook post from an ER doctor treating COVID patients. He wrote about baking his single use N95 mask in order to sterilize it before using that same mask again. And again. And again. “It comes out warm and toasty and clean. It comes out safe. I set it on the windowsill to cool, like an apple pie from easier days,” he wrote. I sent that to Pip, who...
Weekly Contest #73
Lumpy took the chain between his teeth and jiggled it. It clinked and jingled as chains do, but did not loosen. The horse pricked his ears forward and studied the contraption locking his stall door securely in place. He shifted his hooves and moved his body around to come at it for another approach. A furious jangling reverberated through the barn, drowning out the Christmas carols playing softly through the hidden speakers. The grooms, perched on hay bales outside the stall, leaned forward.“He’s getting it,” whispered Manny.“...
Weekly Contest #72
“I know this has been a difficult night for you,” said Nicole, hoping that her voice conveyed some degree of empathy and warmth. It’s been a difficult night for me too, pal. A difficult night, a difficult day, a difficult year. “You’ve been such a help, Mr. Chowdhury. If you remember anything else, anything at all, please call me. Even the smallest detail could help,” she continued, handing the little man her card. You’ve been no goddam help at all. A short man wearing a ski mask with a Hispanic accent and tattoos on h...
Weekly Contest #71
It had been exactly 892 days since Mrs. Ann Gardiner Stewart baked The Cookies and the 15 residents of Suter’s Lane were beginning to worry. “Do you smell vanilla?” Patricia De Leon asked Bill Tupper, slightly breathless as she raced out her front door. Mascara wand still in hand, evening gown trailing behind her, she turned her nose up toward Ann Gardiner Stewart’s townhouse. Bill, a squat gentleman who had long ago served as ambassador to the UK, set down his watering can, turned toward the townhouse that sat across the cul-de-sa...
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