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Weekly Contest #371
Carla Birch glances at her cell phone, notes the time as 11:00 pm, and begins tossing dirty clothes into a washer at Beechville’s only laundromat, the Suds-n-Clean. She hasn’t been in the Suds-n-Clean for over a year, but her washer broke down a week ago, and she can’t even afford to buy a used one, especially after spending all her savings on divorce lawyers, protection orders, and surveillance cameras. She’s startled by how dumpy the laundromat is now. Only two ceiling lights are working, and they’re buzzing like dying hornets. Cobwebs ha...
Weekly Contest #361
It’s a hot, humid, overcast day in late August and Pearl Pack is preparing to bury her late husband, Leonard Pack. She’s standing at the burial site, along with a minister and five mourners—her sister-in-law Carla, Carla’s husband Bernie, and Bernie’s three brothers Mike, Dale, and Sam. Pearl doesn’t know why Bernie’s brothers are there. She can't remember Leonard ever speaking to them in the three years she was married to him. She would have warned them not to come, but now it’s too late. They are here, and there is nothing she can do abou...
Weekly Contest #352
CW: Mass death, suicide, apocalyptic themes The Grayscale Syndrome “This is the Friday night edition of the Critical Mass podcast with Ava Winslow. I would ask how everyone is doing, but that seems too ironic, even for me. I know how everybody is doing. And it appears we’re not going to make it, are we? I mean, it’s been what? Two, three weeks since the Grayscale Syndrome affected the whole world? Half of us are dead from homicide or suicide. Half of us are insane, or almost insane. With no one to maintain the electrical grid, this will be m...
Weekly Contest #334
When Tilly materialized in a dingy kitchen that reeked of smoke, onions, and wood rot, she sighed with weary resignation. Same old song and dance, she thought. Another bedraggled, sobbing young woman sitting by a fireplace, surrounded by a mop bucket, three mice, and a big, pointy-nosed rat.The white rat stood up on its hind legs, stared at Tilly, twitched its whiskers, and said, “Who the heck are you?”“I’m this girl’s fairy godmother, and I’m here to help her,” Tilly replied with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.“You don’t look like a...
Weekly Contest #319
Sigmund: Hello, Jane. How are you feeling today? I hope things have been going well for you. Let’s see, we had a therapy session two days ago, and you were feeling depressed and estranged from reality? Have those symptoms worsened? Jane: Yes, Sigmund. I have this weird sensation that I can’t get rid of. It’s like I’m watching myself outside my body. Everything seems staged and superficial. Sometimes, I think I’m being controlled remotely, like I’m a robot. I’m so scared. Maybe I should see a doctor, maybe there is something physically wrong...
Weekly Contest #299
Every morning, 38-year-old Britta Mack removes the SmileLock device clamped on her face, logs into the government-monitored SafeSurf network, and begins her shift as a Subversive Expression Analyst for the Department of Homeland Security and Compliance (DHSC). Before she begins the day flagging potential subversives visiting the food distribution center, Britta is required by law to listen to President William V. Humbletack’s speech “Suicide is Treason”, an hour-long verbal tranquilizer punctuated with common Humbletack-isms like “history te...
Weekly Contest #289
The Oppressive Weight of Unspoken Things -1- Woman, 40, Seriously Injures Child in AccidentBy Vickie Mills, Ace Media Group Local Content DeskApril 22, 2024 A Highland Heights woman will not face charges following a crash that left a four-year-old seriously injured. The accident happened on April 15 at the intersection of 4th Street and Plesser Avenue around 7:00 pm. According to an affidavit obtained by Ace Media Group, witnesses told police that the four-year-old girl ran into the middle of the street and was hit by Deirdre...
Weekly Contest #268
A heat wave strangles the life out of the summer that forty-year-old Muriel Winslow returns to her childhood home of Sampleville, Ohio to attempt sobriety. It’s the first time in her life she has even considered sobriety and intends to evict the demons by foreclosing on her past. She realized that staying in NYC to pursue sobriety would be an act of self-sabotage. Resisting daily glasses of wine and nightly martinis while entombing herself in her apartment would be as futile as the filaments of clouds thinking they could prevent the sun from...
Weekly Contest #263
Clara Crenshaw has been waiting for her mother to pick her up at the school bus stop for hours. The horizon swallowed the sun long ago, and a full moon's faint outline is visible in the twilight sky. Her mother’s lateness terrifies her. Something has happened, something bad, probably, knowing her mother. Clara tried to tell Aunt Mona that her mother frightens her, that she didn’t want her mother picking her up on the last day of seventh grade, but Aunt Mona insisted Pearl Crenshaw is fine now. “They wouldn’t release Pearl if she wasn’t bette...
Weekly Contest #257
No VacancyCharacter List:IRIS GILCHRIST: A thin, middle-aged woman with wavy brown hair and a habit of gesturing with her hands when she speaks.THE NURSETHE MANFADE IN:A small motel room is dimly illuminated by a full moon visible outside the window. A woman in her 40s is sitting on the side of the bed, talking on her cell phone and nervously tapping her fingers on the bed table. IRIS(glancing nervously at the wall farthest from her)This is Iris Gilchrist in Room 4B. I can hear loud knocking noises through the wall and it’s keeping me awake....
Weekly Contest #245
Sitting on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment, Miriam Westlake has two options--euthanize the rest of the day by swallowing two Valium with a glass of wine or watch the solar eclipse sober. She decides to stay sober. She lets her fingertips hover over the laptop's keyboard, waiting for something to burst through the monastery-like emptiness of writer’s block lodged in her mind. She resigns herself to the fact that the only thought bouncing against the sides of her skull will concern how long it would take her to walk to the liquor store...
Weekly Contest #239
Ava has been driving for hours—days? She can’t be sure. Passively obeying highway signs without being forced to make a decision is oddly sedative, almost hypnotic. She considers the possibility that she has been driving for so long the car may actually be an extension of her body by now. Abandoning it now would be an act of deliberate self-dismemberment. The inability to navigate would relegate her to lying immobile on the side of the road, flailing like a turtle flipped on its back. Scavengers would begin picking at her flesh as the sun bro...
Weekly Contest #230
"You can make me bleed all you want. But I'll never scream for you." Chloe Stone heard her lover’s wife scream this bizarre declaration at him within days of moving into a rental house on a dead-end street. It was after midnight when the wife’s bleating awakened Chloe. She witnessed the wife stumble out the front door and stand in front of the floodlight illuminating the circle driveway. The wife clutched a half-filled wine glass and a burning cigarette in one hand. She was wearing a knee-length red nightgown and white fluffy slippers. Chl...
Weekly Contest #95
Annabelle Montgomery is six years old and already understands how perilous and unreliable the world can be. People, things, can suddenly go missing, without warning. No explanations are provided, no apologies. Faces of women hover at her periphery, frozen with expressions bitter as arugula. They orbit her world like asteroids without trajectories. They chain-smoke angrily, glaring at husbands or boyfriends silently from stained kitchen tables or rusty porch swings. They are perpetually waiting for the men to give them money. The women in Ann...
Weekly Contest #92
A peculiar, steamy inertia dripped over the town that summer. Days resembled perpetual nuclear explosions of white-hot sunlight. Night seemed as transitory as a last-minute dream. Flowers wilted as soon as they bloom. Ticks dropped off trees onto people’s scalps, latching on with unnatural ferocity. Mosquitoes swarmed in roaming packs, biting anything that smell faintly of blood and helplessness. Movement ceased as creeks dried up, revealing primordial bones turned to stone. Odors of rotting, overripe fruit attracted flies half-blinded by ce...
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