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Weekly Contest #373
A word of warning before we begin: never try on a coat from a hotel's lost property. I know how that sounds. I have said it to three generations of new staff, and every one of them has smiled at me the way you smile at an old woman who insists the kettle is listening. Nobody believes it. I did not believe it myself for the first eleven years, and I was the one who had been told. The cloakroom of the Hotel Waterlelie is a narrow room behind the marble staircase, and for as long as I have worked in it, it has smelled of wet wool, radiator dus...
Weekly Contest #371
Before the place began changing, he had known it by repetition. A low, heavy thudding that vanished into itself because it was nearly always there. A softer disturbance that came and went without pattern, sometimes long, sometimes broken into little bursts. The enclosing warmth shifted with him — one side gave when he pushed, another slowly returned him to where he had been. He could fold, turn, drift a little. There were no edges that stayed hard for long. Then one did. The enclosure gathered around his back and shoulders and held him until...
Weekly Contest #370
The wine stopped falling halfway to the floor. Natalie noticed because she had thrown it. Not the wine. The glass. The wine had merely been unfortunate enough to be inside it. The glass remained above the kitchen tiles at an angle that looked temporary. Red wine curved from its rim in a perfect sheet, each drop separate and motionless. Scott looked down at it. Neither spoke. Outside the window, rain hung above the garden in thin silver lines. A blackbird hovered three feet above the lawn, wings spread, head turned slightly as though it had r...
Weekly Contest #368
‘I wish people meant what they say.’ I say this because my brother has just promised our mother he will visit on Sunday, and he won’t. Bram hasn’t visited our mother on a Sunday in fourteen months, though he has promised to on eleven separate occasions; I know the number because Mum marks his visits on the kitchen calendar before they happen. BRAM — LUNCH is written this Sunday in blue ink, beneath a small drawing of a chicken. “You don’t know that,” she says. I tell her I absolutely do. “He might come,” she says. I tell her he won’t. She ...
Weekly Contest #367
The last time I came here, I promised myself I’d rather bite through my own tongue than set foot on this property again. At the time, I meant it. Apparently, fourteen years is long enough for a promise to become negotiable. I park on the gravel shoulder because I can’t bring myself to drive under the archway. The iron gates stand open. Above them, ST. BRIGID’S is picked out in black serif letters. I shut off the engine and sit with my hands on the steering wheel, listening to the soft ticking of the cooling car. There’s a faint smell of sea...
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 silho...
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 had...
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 ro...
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...
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. "T...
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 ...
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 tha...
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...
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 as ...
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