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Weekly Contest #361
I used to believe memory was a kind of mercy, like a softening of the edges, or a gentle rearranging of the truth so we could bear it. But the older I get, the more I realise memory is a river. It carries what it wants and buries what it chooses. And sometimes, when the season is right and the banks swell, it returns what you thought was long drowned. This summer, the river came back for me. It began with a letter. A real one, on paper, the handwriting slanted and familiar in a way that made my stomach tighten. I found it on the mat one morn...
Weekly Contest #360
08:59The clock above the hospital bed is wrong.Paul knows this the way he knows the weight of his own bones, and the way he knows the taste of iron in his mouth when he wakes from the dreams. The second hand stutters, hesitates, then jerks forward as if time itself is dragging a broken leg. It’s been doing that for days. Or hours. Or minutes. He can’t tell anymore.The room smells of antiseptic and something sweeter beneath it, like rotting flowers. Machines hum in soft, obedient rhythms. A plastic tube snakes into his arm. Another curls bene...
Weekly Contest #359
The house on Barrow Lane had been empty for twenty‑three years, but it still breathed. A slow, patient exhalation of old timber settling, of damp stone shifting under its own memories. People in the village said the house sighed at night. Others said it whispered. A few, the ones who had grown up before the tragedy, claimed it called out. Matthew didn’t believe any of that. He had returned to the village for one reason only: to empty the house, sign the papers, and sell it. His mother’s death had made him the last surviving heir, and the sol...
Weekly Contest #357
Stephen Walters had lived alone for so long that silence had become a kind of weather system inside him; a low, unbroken pressure that settled in the bones. His flat overlooked a narrow street in Woking where the lampposts flickered like old men clearing their throats, and the pavement glistened with the residue of last night’s rain. Every evening, Stephen sat by the window with a mug of tea cooling in his hands, watching the world pass by without ever touching him. Across the street, in the top‑floor flat of the opposite building, lived Adr...
Weekly Contest #356
The morning after Matt Burrows stepped in front of the knife, the estate felt wrong in a way no one could name. Not supernatural, just emptier, as if a single person’s absence had hollowed out the air. The police tape was already gone. The council workers had pressure‑washed the pavement before dawn, leaving the tarmac darker than the rest of the street. A neat, rectangular patch of sanitised grief. Neighbours walked past it quickly. No one wanted to be seen looking. Matt’s mother, Ruth, stood at the window of their flat, watching the spot w...
Weekly Contest #355
The hall smelled of old varnish and boiled water. Someone had tried to mask it with lilies, but the scent only settled on top of everything else, like a polite lie. Daniel Pike stood near the back wall, hands clasped loosely in front of him, watching the mourners drift in. He nodded when people glanced his way, offering a small, neutral smile. It was the kind of expression that cost nothing and revealed even less. Raymond Pike’s photograph sat on a folding table at the front of the room. The frame was too polished for the setting, the kind o...
Weekly Contest #354
His eyes fluttered open and for a brief moment, he forgot who he was. A moment of respite, with neither pain nor anguish. The room was dark and he could just about hear the soft chirping of birds outside the window, searching for food. He turned to look at his alarm clock, which he hadn’t set for months; his body had learned the shape of the silence that came before dawn. A silence that used to be filled by the soft breathing of another person, the rustle of sheets, the warmth of a body that had shared his bed for thirty-two years. All that ...
Weekly Contest #353
The sea had not moved all night.Lucas Linfield sensed it before he opened his eyes, before he pushed himself upright with a groan, before he shuffled across the warped floorboards of his cottage. It was in the air - the wrongness. A silence so complete it felt like a held breath. Even the gulls, those ragged, screaming heralds of dawn, were absent.He sat on the edge of his bed, listening.Nothing.No waves. No wind. No world.Just the faint, rhythmic throb behind his eyes, like a pulse that wasn’t his.He pressed his fingertips to his sternum, t...
Weekly Contest #352
Laura had always known that colours weren’t just something you saw—they were something you felt. Most people looked at a painting and talked about shades and tones. Laura talked about textures, Flavors, temperatures. She didn’t remember the first time she realized she was different; she only remembered the first time she realized other people weren’t like her. She was five, sitting in art class, when she dipped her brush into a pot of bright yellow paint. The moment the bristles touched the paper, she felt it: a warm fizzing on her tongue, l...
Weekly Contest #183
There I was, just standing there when what I wanted to do was forbidden. I was brought up with morals thrust upon me, religion was shoved down my throat not as a spiritual guide but rather a list of 'don'ts' that were drilled into from an early age. My parents were God fearing and that fear controlled them, it permeated their daily lives and as a consequence, me and my sister were brought up with a hundred and ten commandments.So here I was, just standing outside a coffee shop, pumped full of caffeine (coffee was a sin in my upbringing) and ...
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