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Weekly Contest #332
For an hour now, the man had watched the cartoon tiger pasted on the plate glass window. A child left it. The man had never learned his name. But it seemed the moment that the child disappeared, the rain had fallen cold and angry, and a strange lethargy crept over him as he looked out onto the shopping street. There were meetings he should go to. Reservations he must keep. And yet he’d sit there till the storm ended, protecting the tiger from the rain.He’d loved tigers once upon a time. As a young boy in the early 90s, he’d read Calvin and H...
Weekly Contest #312
“…Robins exhorting threadbare branches. Saxophones battling beneath their wings. Oh, I close my eyes and remember girls shivering in premature sundresses, the fresh scent of winter still so slowly taking leave. Then the sudden apparition of gardens riotous with spring!“But I suppose I don’t have eyes now, do I?”As if the sudden apparition of his own remembered spring, the voice had risen out of nothing when Safiyah set her flowers down. Elegiac yet oddly stilted, low and somehow gravelly, it can only be the revenant of one Jack Smoke, the dy...
Weekly Contest #307
There’s a tower by the riverbank. Sometimes in mid to late July, when the summer rains blow out of the south and fill its dead sluices up to bursting, its lights abruptly shudder on. Then the decrepit structure begins to feel almost alive, and an ivory glow washes out over the nearby village. Lights up the little skiffs and dugouts, pools in the children’s ragged birchbark canoes, and for a few moments it reminds everyone of all the things that might have been.That’s when they do their testing. A few bespectacled old Keepers stumble out, loo...
Weekly Contest #300
The metro tossed me out into a muggy summer evening. Corporate towers crouched around me, while banks prowled up from the noxious gloom. I shivered, abruptly feverish in this city that now seemed so strange. Of course it had all been just the same this morning, but getting fired from a job you love adds ten degrees to every gulp of air, and another hundred faces to the faceless, frothing crowds.I gritted my teeth, and made my way to the museum. Passing the overflowing trashcan at its entrance, I tossed my useless shop key into a bucket of sp...
Winner of Weekly Contest #297 🏆
On a cool, clear day in late September, I went out for my final cup of tea. There was a place I liked downtown. Yemeni. The girls who worked there wore sleek headscarves printed with bright, abstracted patterns. Sunny spirals that went on for years.Handing them my last ten dollars, I took my tea out for a walk beneath the elms. Joggers raced their dogs into the evening gloom, in a park-turned-arboretum that I remembered from my college days. Tracing the path back to a familiar bench I slung my backpack down and sat. I poured my tea into a th...
Weekly Contest #284
His proudest touch, Strand reflected, had been the birdsong in the trees. Four species sang in four-part harmony, an innovation from before the war. He’d resurrected it that night, and their fluting choruses had spilled across the banquet tables and the garden maze. The birds sang that all was well. Their training could take a year, longer than it took the navy to turn out a new dreadnought, and to some, their opulence might even seem illegal. By the letter of the law, Strand supposed it was. Even genius had its rationing, and there we...
Weekly Contest #135
“Mackenzie?” You wake at night to a name nobody ever calls you, something given up in childhood and given back in adulthood unexpectedly, like so much else about the moment and the things that brought you here. It’s a sea of sheets and more pillows than you’re used to, a bed that smells like rosewater liberally doused in cat hair, a white bedspread stained here and there with the wine you both spilled that night. An hour might have passed. Two. Her voice makes it sound like a lifetime. “Hmm?” you say. Little more than a groan,...
Weekly Contest #125
“Galanthus nivalis.” “Oh yeah? The common snowdrop. There’s a hundred freezing outside, so why is this one freezing in here?” “Common! Hardly.” February crept in through the windows, invaded gaps in the old, tumbling masonry. Thomas’s breath fogged the air, there was frost around the rim of Grandma Evie’s wine glass. Her bedroom's only fire burned at the end of her cigarette. But still, the old witch refused to die. Thomas took her hand; dry, cold cracked skin and age hollowed bones, stretched across the meanest bitch Eng...
Weekly Contest #123
Garvey Street was a wall of writhing sound. Everywhere Atticus turned guitars bent and screamed, pianists played blocky, rollicking chords. Rock and Roll warred with the Blues from the cracks of a dozen doorways. Drunken flotsam drifted from the bright pool of one dying streetlight to the next in search of the perfect sound or the cheapest drink. And Atticus, who had killed tonight, should have been right at home. He wasn’t though. The skin hung off him loosely, more like a bad suit than a man. What passed for Atticus’s soul itched, ...
Shortlisted for Contest #117 ⭐️
Erin was a speck of dust on the map back home, trapped in the holographic border marking the edge of Human space. All around her, specks of dust were still exploding. When she thought of home Erin meant West Virginia. Of all the places left on Old Earth, West Virginia might have changed the least. It was still poor. Still a backwater. Still hell, for a precocious young woman like her. If a person could still be precocious when they were dying, and young after they’d been to war. Home wasn’t the Olympus and it never would be. Throug...
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