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Weekly Contest #376
What is that strange whimpering noise? It echoes round inside my head like a rotting dream. Like a hound tied to a tree inside a storm of rain. Inside my head. Like a storm of echoes inside a rotting tree. I need to stop the thinking. It has eroded my senses ever since I took that helmet-on-helmet whack. Concussion protocol be damned. I managed to fake it and went back on. Took another whack. Maybe that’s where it started? I was blind. Couldn’t see a damn thing, though I heard the team doctor talking, asking me to follow his finger. I can’t ...
Weekly Contest #358
Nobody believed in me. That was their first mistake. I get that. I know how rational behaviour is supposed to work. I can see it in others. I just can’t replicate it. I have to deal with myself. That’s hard enough. I don’t know how anyone else manages to deal with me. The trouble is that I come across as, shall we say, not very clever. People ask me questions and I don’t answer. I get this look in my eyes that I’ve heard people call ‘dumb as an ox’. But I’m just pondering all the possible responses to their question. Do I want a cup of tea? ...
Weekly Contest #357
You’re not going to like me. I’m used to it. It’s as hard to justify as it is to understand. Some people call it sleeping rough. Government calls it unsheltered homeless. I call it home. You have to understand though. I choose this. It’s cheap. Many years ago, in countries like Mali, Lebanon and Zaire, I got into the habit of sleeping in any conditions, on any surface. I don’t talk about that much. I avoid homeless aggregations though. They’re a magnet for drugs, fleas and dirt. Also for do-gooders, police, city council, religious nutcases, ...
Weekly Contest #354
‘Vengeance is a dish best served immediately.’ ‘If a murder happens in the forest and it’s not reported, did it really happen?’ Jason passed the time re-working Earth aphorisms as the craft picked up speed for the slingshot past Neptune and automatic systems prepared for worm drive. Writing them in his paper notebook. He had a special dispensation. People rarely used ink and paper anymore, but it could get boring in the space between planets. ‘A bird in the hand is worth eating.’ ‘A friend in need is a friend best ignored.’ “Jason,” Maria sa...
Weekly Contest #333
You started by saying you’d found an empty glass on a table with red wine dregs, a portable gas stove still burning and a notebook and pen. Then you realised you needed to start the story at an earlier stage. You were in a whiteout. The snow-filled cloud surrounded you, obliterating everything else. White without texture, without form. The cold, bitter wind drove the snow-filled mist into your exposed skin. Bumps in the ground reared up and tried to trip you. Icicles grew on your eyebrows. You kept moving because stopping was not a good opt...
Weekly Contest #328
The chimpanzee had come from a Belgian zoo. An iron collar was bolted round its neck. Two chains bolted to the collar led right and left to iron stakes hammered deep into the grass. It could move a few feet in any direction but no further. It sat eating an apple, occasionally tugging one chain or the other to test the limits of its freedom. A late winter breeze. One of the watching soldiers threw a stone which hit its shoulder. It leapt up and shrieked. The soldiers laughed. “Nein!” the Hauptmann said. It wasn’t an order, just a request to h...
Weekly Contest #327
I was never a dirtbag climber. Dirtbag is a specific sub-genre of the species rock climber. There may be females of the sub-species but I am yet to come across any. This probably explains why so many dirtbags remain single. There’s something about the dirtbag lifestyle that, I suspect, is less attractive to the female gender. Maybe it’s the word ‘dirt’? After all, who wants to move into a van that smells of young male sweat, to pee in public toilets or behind trees, to cook on a small gas stove, and spend every evening talking about the beta...
Weekly Contest #325
All you can feel is pain and what wakes you is a breath of wind. Breathing on my cheek, like she used to. A brief memory of her, then every nerve-end explodes into life and slams messages at my brain to say this hurts like hell, and blood is everywhere and burbling out of me, and pain is a hurricane soaking into every fibre and the car’s motor screams as if some idiot has his foot planted on the gas and some small intelligence tells me it’s my foot and I reach down and pull my cramping leg back and scream with the pain of the bone sticking t...
Weekly Contest #323
“STOP TAPPING YOUR FOOT ON THE GODDAM FLOOR!” I knew she was getting riled but it was difficult to just stop. I mean, it has always been difficult. People get riled. Teachers used to abuse me, keep me late, call in my parents. My Dad would whack me. I’d struggle for a while to contain it but, what the hey – it’s a part of me and just runs its own stupid maniacal, tap, tap, tapping course. Now I have a job and if the floor supervisor isn’t watching co-workers whack me over the head when they pass, but I still tap. I have to. I’ve been threate...
Weekly Contest #313
“What the hell is a transom? “ I often wished my mother would just shut up. Her voice was like a squeaking meerkat on steroids. The builder told her that her transom was crumbling and quoted £8000 to fix it. They would have to take out the four window panels and two of them needed to be rebuilt because the wooden frames had rotted and a stonemason would have to carve another transom. “The sandstone cross member held in place by the mullions,” he said. “What the hell is a mullion?” He pointed to the vertical stone section in the middle of the...
Weekly Contest #308
Hangovers. God’s little punishment for no longer being 19. Along with all the other stuff – regret, arthritis, memory, heartburn, incipient decrepitude. I take one step out of the wooden cabin into the glowing mid-summer morning of the Stockholm archipelago. The sunshine that starts soon after midnight. People are walking past on the gravel path. Happy blonde people. Rays of sunshine made human. With good looks, legs and long blonde hair. I almost recoil from the niceness of it all, back into the shade of the aquavit of the long, half-night ...
Weekly Contest #307
OK, thank you for sitting still. As some of you may know, a society based on quiet obedience is a society without problems. I have put a piece of paper and a pen on the desk in front of you. There is also a key. When I say ‘Now’ you can all take off your hoods. Anyone who takes off their hood before I say that word will suffer the consequences, and I think you all understand the consequences. I think we’d all agree though that not having Jensen with us improves both the average IQ and the social empathy quotient of the group. While the avera...
Weekly Contest #283
I drive a semi-truck. It’s a living. The road soars beneath you, and give or take the odd damn fool brake-checking a 40 ton leviathan doing 70 mph, you are the master of your moments, at least until you pull up and the sour warehouse guy, sad god of his pissy little domain, says he was expecting you three hours earlier. The road has its idiot newbie drivers who think the power of the semi engine equals power in the world, but they learn eventually that they are just small dead leaves blown how and where the wind wants. Power belongs to other...
Weekly Contest #278
“How dare you?” the priest yelled. I shrugged. “The confession is sanctified. It is between the penitent and God. You had no right…” “Why do you need a confessor then.” “What?” “If it’s between the penitent and God, why does the penitent need a confessor?” “The confessor’s role is to listen and to understand, not to judge.” “So you help people to avoid the judgement of their fellow men.” “No, we enable them to admit their sins, to unburden themselves.” “And then you let them go free because…?” “If we didn’t then people would never confess th...
Weekly Contest #252
I know what I did was not nice. I’m a good person, but good people can be led astray. The world is awash with secrets. A married woman has sex with a visitor and her husband never knows that the resulting child is not his. A boy gets a girl pregnant but she does not tell him; she disappears and gives their child up for adoption. Now though! You take a DNA test intending to research your family history, and oh! the secrets that are revealed. It started with the small thrill of discovery. I had bought a DNA test kit for myself but not opened i...
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