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Weekly Contest #366
The first thing they taught me was how to swallow. Not because I had forgotten. Because nobody could prove I remembered. Apparently there was a difference. The woman across the table smiled with professional optimism — the kind that had survived too many disappointed people to belong to her anymore. "Take your time." Between us sat a porcelain bowl filled with clear broth. Steam drifted toward the ceiling. No garnish. No color. No ambition. The first meal, I would later learn, was always forgettable. I reached for the spoon. Three ...
Weekly Contest #365
The email came on a Tuesday, which felt insulting. Kim had always assumed news like this would arrive on a Friday, with some ceremony attached, not slotted between a plumbing invoice and a reminder to renew her workshop insurance. Subject: Ondaatje Prize — Shortlist Confirmed. She read it twice, standing up. Sitting down felt premature. Six makers. One violin each, judged blind, strung and played behind a screen by a soloist who wouldn't be told whose instrument was whose. It was the closest thing her trade had to a title fight, and Kim ha...
Weekly Contest #364
"That box can go," he said, without looking inside. "How do you know, if you haven't even checked what's in it?" His mouth tightened. "Because it's the one with the fax machine in it. Nobody has used a fax machine in this house since Jonathan was in primary school." She let it go. He was probably right, and arguing with him about a fax machine was not how she wanted to spend the morning. It wasn't a big room. Boxes along the walls, taped shut, dated in marker. Grey light through curtainless windows. It had been Jonathan's once, then the ...
Weekly Contest #363
This story has been revised following the thoughtful feedback of fellow writers... The taste of old copper bit into my tongue. Around me, the wood of The Albatross did not just creak; it shrieked. Every oak rib of the merchant vessel groaned under the weight of the Atlantic, which had turned into a churning, frothing black. "Hold her steady, you miserable dogs!" I roared, my voice cutting through the howl of the gale. Somewhere forward I heard one of the men let out a cry of pure fear as a wave crashed over the gunwale — a sound that stole m...
Weekly Contest #362
By the time I turned seventy-three, I owned two hundred and forty-seven guidebooks. They occupied an entire wall of my apartment: Morocco, Peru, Mongolia, Iceland, Japan, Namibia, Patagonia. Cities with names that sounded invented. Villages accessible only by river. Mountains that required three days of climbing and lungs younger than mine. Every shelf was arranged by continent. Every guidebook was pristine. Not one had ever left the apartment. I told myself, every year, that later would come. Visitors often mistook them for souvenirs. "They...
Weekly Contest #361
She heard him before she saw him. She had woken before her uncle on the second morning—which surprised her, because at home she never woke before noon if she could help it—and she had pulled on her boots and gone outside into the blue-grey of early morning because something had called her. Not a sound. Just the feeling that something was happening. The barn was warm and loud in a different way than the house. Loud with breathing and the soft shifting of large bodies. The stock moved slowly, as though there had never been any reason to rush. ...
Weekly Contest #360
The waiting room had a clock with no second hand. Xander had been staring at it long enough to develop opinions about that: a deliberate kindness, maybe, or the cruelest design choice in the building. Right now, 2:45, it felt cruel. The minute hand hadn’t moved in what felt like a week. Forty minutes until visiting hours ended. Forty minutes until his father, three floors up, drifted back into the sedated half-sleep that passed for rest these days, and the window — the actual, literal, hospital-policy window — closed until tomorrow. Except t...
Weekly Contest #359
"You are not a mother," said the man in the white coat, and he raised a reprimanding finger—not at me, precisely, but at the swollen belly I had long since ceased to regard as wholly my own. His junior colleague flinched visibly at the word. That is among the first lessons taught within these walls: the word mother is a protected trademark. It belongs to women with flower subscriptions and oak nursery furniture. We are called carriers. Climate-controlled production environments in biological form. My tongue, as ever, moved more swiftly t...
Weekly Contest #358
The neon tube above the sink did not buzz; it throbbed at exactly sixty hertz, matching the pulse in Matteo’s left temple. Matteo was a silvering man who collected empty frames. His apartment was not small, but it was narrow, shaped like the inside of a clarinet. Every surface was covered in brushed aluminum foil, which he applied daily with a soft felt roller to ensure no seams showed. Seams allowed the outside to leak in. He sat at the zinc table. On the table sat a single, unpeeled hard-boiled egg."One," Matteo said to the egg. The egg di...
Weekly Contest #357
The tremor began in the tip of his index finger, which pressed dangerously hard against the starched tablecloth. Beneath the spotless white linen, his nail left a pale crescent mark. The man at the head of the table did not notice. The room seemed to move with his slow, deep breathing. He sat leaning forward, his heavy laughter vibrating through the solid oak of the dining table. With a casual, intimate gesture, the older man reached across the silver platters and placed the tenderest slice of meat onto the younger man's plate. Exactly a...
Weekly Contest #356
The apple tree had been there longer than the house. She had watched the road arrive one summer, a scar cut through the field that healed into habit. She had watched the fence lean and lean and finally give, the posts going dark with rot before they went down, the wire just lying there in the grass after. She did not mark these things. They happened, the way weather happened, the way the field went gold in August and grey in November and came back anyway. The boy came breathless, always. Shoes off before he reached her, dropped in the gras...
Weekly Contest #354
He waits until the remaining movement in her begins to recede. Not surrender. Not yet. Just the moment her shape seems to feel there is nowhere left to continue toward.She stands at the counter with her hands against the granite: fingers spread, trying to leave a small trace of existence.He doesn’t come closer. He gives her space.“Try again,” he says.The object still rests where she abandoned it. Dark surface. No invitation left in it.She doesn’t recognize it and looks away.Good.That’s where it begins.A minute passes. Or five. Even time know...
Weekly Contest #352
“Eight,” Philip said. He felt it immediately—too fast. The class laughed. “There is no eight,” said the teacher, too quickly for it to be kind. “Look again.” He did. Brown dots. Gray dots. “Still eight.” Luc De Smet, front row, a face arranged by God for betrayal. “Maybe he’s blind.” “I am not blind,” Philip snapped. “You are not blind,” said the teacher. “Some people see colors differently.” Luc smirked. “So he’s half-blind.” It was his mother that evening, slicing carrots into a pan. “You’re not missing much.” “Apparently I am.” She did no...
Weekly Contest #351
Martin Hale didn’t speak immediately.He just watched Aaron. The city flickered behind him, reflected in the glass like something alive—restless, electrical, waiting. Aaron felt it in his chest before he understood it. This wasn’t a meeting. It was a test. Aaron sat on the edge of the chair. Too straight. Too aware of his hands. He hadn’t slept. Hadn’t stopped talking.And now Martin was looking at him like he already knew the ending. He had spent three years in a damp basement, building Aether: an AI model so advanced it bordered on the super...
Weekly Contest #350
Barnaby Q. Flinch was not a man built for high-stakes felony. He was a man built for spreadsheets, lukewarm chamomile tea, and the meticulous preservation of his collection of 19th-century buttonhooks. His most daring act to date had been returning a library book two days late in 2012, an event that had caused him a mild stress rash. Yet there he was, standing in the middle of the most secure vault in the City National Bank, holding a sandwich baggie containing what appeared to be the Star of Azkaban diamond, while wearing a pair of neon-pin...
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