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Weekly Contest #360
The cab rattled off down the alley, leaving us at the side entrant to Huber’s Dime Museum on 14th Street. Mr. Jimmy held my right arm, the Blue Man Tooke held my left. Despite everything – the abduction, the threats – I was more curious than scared.Mr. Jimmy unbolted and opened the door of the horse stable. The stench was terrible. “Meet Bosco the lion”.The lion roared, the ground shook, I recoiled at the sound, the smell, and the sight of the mangy beast that was standing in the corner of the one-stall stable.“What the…”“Language… F...
Finn opened the door of his dorm room and found the Hollis Hall house porter standing on the landing. The man handed him a Western Union Telegraph envelope, then disappeared down the stairwell. The telegram was brief and to the point: April 18th, 1906To: Finnegan Titus DeBoort, Hollis Hall, Harvard University, MAYOUR MOTHER IS DEAD.GRIESSMAN. Finn went to the Bursar’s office and was granted use of the college telephone. The long-distance operator parlayed for him a priority connection from Boston to New York, and from New York to the 37th St...
I beached ashore on a clinker-built wooden row-boat, blushing at the touch of the supporting hand of the young oarsman with the far-away eyes. The green cairn stood sentinel atop a rock outcrop jutting into the frigid gray sea, witness to the tendrils of sea-smoke drifting across the frigid Arctic Ocean like a spent ghost army returning from a long campaign. On the horizon, the weary spirit-soldiers amassed upward into bruised cloud; raining upwards.The Cairn loomed larger than a house when I crested the frozen tundra; its foundation ston...
Weekly Contest #359
Doctor Lea Calder was an accident-about-to-happen. She was a large woman who moved rigorously through the crowds at Shanghai Pudong Airport like a tight-end footballer bursting through an under-sized defense. Bewildered business travelers and frightened parents scurried aside as she charged down the concourse towards Gate 17 where her flight to New York City was scheduled to depart, but waiting for one last passenger. Aboard the waiting Boeing 777 Lea was greeted by endless rows of scowling faces. A 20-minute delay did not seem such a big de...
There was a commotion on wintry Madison Avenue. Old man J.P. Morgan and his traveling circus of clerks and bodyguards clattered home in a fleet of crimson horse-drawn landaus, concluding another of his theatrical excursions downtown. I was tempted to watch from the window of my study on the second floor of my house on Thirty-Seventh Street, but my visitor, Walter Baker, was twisting in the chair opposite me and craning his neck toward the street like a schoolboy distracted by a parade.I was inclined to frustrate his curiosity, knowing it wou...
Weekly Contest #358
I went no higher than the first deck of the Eiffel Tower. I reasoned that I was safe, the worst that could happen might be that I tripped and fell down the metal stairs, but it would be impossible to fall all the way to the ground, since I was protected by railings and girders and the care and foresight of the engineers that built the structure. I was safe.Yet I was unable to shake the irrational fear that I might any second plunge headfirst to the distant ground, there to die an agonizing death. Unbeknownst to my companions, my heart was ra...
Weekly Contest #357
“Strong Start”, was a 21-foot Downeast pocket cruiser, a solid bargain but a little bit “tippy”, according to Harry Tarbuck, Brian’s friend up in Rockland. Brian, living and working in Portland, was not an experienced boater but he trusted his friend’s advice and bought the boat.It was late May, a high-pressure system brought clear blue skies, light wind, and warmth to the Gulf of Maine. It was perfect weather to motor the boat 60 miles down the coast, from Rockland to Portland.In their Portland kitchen, contemplating Brian's plan to go get...
Flecks of gold fell from the sky. It was early October, there was a chill in the late afternoon breeze. Reginald Wilcox sat on a bench in the middle of Russell Square Park contemplating the end of the only life he’d ever known. What next? The British Museum was a grand old building. Wilcox, as head cleaner, with over forty years of service to the Museum, knew every door and window, every passageway, storage space, every nook and cranny. Not to mention the vaults. How could the Museum operate without him? The new operations manager was ...
Weekly Contest #346
Their eyes were focused on the black dot at the end of the tunnel“Remember it’s the journey not the destination,” said Peter Barrett, grinning at Emily Jensen as he did at the start of every leg of the road trip.Day seventeen, fourteen thousand miles into the adventure, and the joke was getting old and so was the view.“How does a worm know which way is up, which way is down?’ said Emily, experiencing a familiar jolt of irritation at not being able to answer the question instantly with a google search.“Let’s speculate, shall we?” said Peter, ...
Weekly Contest #333
"Let's not make a scene," I said.This happened episodically, but normally at home or in the car, tactical and private; this was strategic and raw, laid bare before the jury of our peers.My wife did a Shonda Rhimes. “I can’t stand this marriage anymore. We have nothing in common. I don’t care about your frigging book, and I’m fed up listening to you bleat on about your writing. You’ve become a selfish bore and I want you to leave.”The restaurant shrunk around us, the light dimmed. My wife sat opposite me at the secluded two-top but seemed a l...
Weekly Contest #324
Thinking back on things, it was probably Mark's last gig in Singapore and he deserves to know what happened even if he might find the truth hard to handle. Mark, the Scuba diving instructor was also an Englishmen; one of those free-spirit nomads that ended up in Southeast Asia and bummed around on boats from one place to the next. The boat was an ugly tub, one-time luxury yacht turned live-aboard, stripped of its fineries. We were anchored in a small cove off Pulao Linga, an isolated Malaysian island in the Riau archipelago four hours motor-...
Weekly Contest #323
The NASA ground control team in Houston watched with awe as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked flawlessly with the International Space Station. It was an important mission, hastily arranged, so the ground team were relieved when Chief Science Officer, George Maddox, engineering genius and all-around nice guy opened the Quest Air Lock hatch, smiled at the ISS on-board camera and emerged into Unity Node 1.The Houston team high-fived.“Why is Maddox like a mushroom?” said the EECOM, a junior member of the ground control team.“No idea,” said Fli...
Curtis township, population 504, was located at the end of a long road that wound through hills to a lake hidden in the vast wilderness, and I don't think I'm ever going back there. The leader of the Children's Brigade was a girl, twelve or thirteen, with long blond hair twisted and tied like a warrior; she had the palest blue eyes which focused on the distance beyond here and now. They called her Joan, and she was blessed with heavenly spirit, which she expressed in sparing and righteous ways. When she and her fellow Crusaders arrived in ou...
Weekly Contest #320
“Charlie, where are you?” My voice was hoarse now. I had neither water nor trail-mix, and Charlie had my jacket, it was freezing cold, and my damp T-shirt was clinging to me.Why was it taking so long? I looked up at the starry sky and felt betrayed by the euphoria and contentment that had briefly seized me.Why did he turn off the flashlight? Surely, it was harder climbing in the dark?“Charlie! Charlie!” My cries echoed off the mountain and were swallowed by the forest.Lightning flashed again at the horizon, revealing that I was on a narrow l...
As great and beneficent as America is, Petoskey was small and a mean place in the North Woods where chores turned to labor for children who died young or became adults at an early age. It must have been 1889, because I was sixteen years old. It was the second pigeon harvest since the arrival of the peninsula railroad, and the scale of the Colonel’s spring-time operation spoke to the success of the prior year’s undertaking. In a forest clearing, near the crooked lake, dozens of wagons were loaded with hundreds of empty barrels, all waiting in...
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