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Weekly Contest #373
A Boy's Gift He went because his father said it was time. The hand axe rode on the seat between them, loose in an old blanket, and caught the winter light every time the truck took a turn. The boy watched it slide an inch and settle each time. They drove past subdivisions and strip malls half-lit even in daylight, past fields scraped flat and pale. Snow sat in the furrows like something laid over a wound. His father talked about getting a good one this year. A real one. Not the skinny lot tree that shed needles everywhere. The boy nodded...
Weekly Contest #369
Who Remains "Will you have another?" I know that question better than the bottle on the shelf behind the bar. In the two-second pause before I answer someone who's asked me twice, there's only the other sentence — the one I've said alone, in cars, in the shower, until it doesn't feel like a thought anymore. It feels like the weather. Something that happens to me, not something I do. Tonight it happens to me in a restaurant I used to like. She's at a corner table with a man I don't recognize and immediately do. Same haircut, more or less....
Weekly Contest #366
(This story contains: Animal harm and Starvation/desperation) The Only Man on the Mountain The slope gave under him before he understood it was going. He went down through brush and shale, and Bear went down with him, closer, faster, until the ground leveled out and stopped and they lay in it, breathing. His leg was wrong. He knew that before he moved it, before he saw it. He didn't look at the leg first. He turned onto his side and got his hands into Bear's coat, working through it — shoulders, ribs, the long muscle of the back leg — c...
Weekly Contest #363
Brambles The pilum head came up first. Marchetti brushed the dirt back and left it in place while he photographed the trench. Iron, square-sectioned point, socket collapsed where the wood had gone. The kind that went through a shield and through whatever was behind the shield. He had been at the site three weeks. The valley east of Uccellina had been written about and walked over and metal-detected, and the men who came through with the detectors had taken what they wanted and left the rest. He was working the rest. Brambles grew along t...
Weekly Contest #362
A WAMPUS CAT CHRISTMAS The lucky cat waved from behind the glass, paw ticking up and down in an empty room nobody could get into. The Pratts had walked to Wong's like this every Christmas morning. Three blocks from their house to the corner where the red lanterns hung year-round and the smell of ginger, grease, and star anise usually reached the sidewalk before they did. This year the door was locked. A handwritten sign had been taped to the glass. CLOSED. No date. No note. No "Merry Christmas." Just the word. "Shit," Dad said. Mom l...
Weekly Contest #361
One Thing Left Before Summer Ends The Peonies The peonies came before anything else had stirred. Their buds arrived tight as closed fists, green-shouldered, faintly blushed at the seams where the petals pressed against each other and sweated a thin, sweet nectar into the morning air. No bee had found them yet. No wind carried the word. Only the ants knew, moving over the rounded shoulders of each bud with the unhurried confidence of the already-invited, tracing the sugar seams, bathing in what leaked through. They didn't wait for the blo...
Weekly Contest #359
The Knots The hammer strikes the rail at 04:30. Pod'yom. Rise up. The women climb down from the bunks, their breath visible in the cold air of the barracks. It is winter in the colony, and winter here does not ask permission. The walls are concrete. The windows are small and high. The cold comes through anyway. A woman carries the waste bucket toward the door. Steam rises from it as she walks. Outside, the sky is still dark. The pregnant woman stands near the washing basin. Seven months along. Her belly rounds beneath the grey smock the...
Weekly Contest #356
No One Knows Your Name Until It's on a Stone The grass was still wet from last night when John pulled the Toro Recycler off the truck. He set it on level ground and checked the deck. Wet morning like this, you had to watch the clumping. He primed the bulb three times, set the choke, and pulled. Nothing. He pulled again. The engine coughed and quit. The handle was cold in his hands. "Come on, Mulcher." He pulled again and it caught, rough at first, then settling into its idle. He stood there a moment with his hand on the handlebar listenin...
Weekly Contest #354
OLD LIGHT The baby blue paper was folded in your jacket against your ribs. She had given it to you the night before the flight. A ream of small sheets, with envelopes to match. Not expensive. Deliberate. She had said you have to write to me every day and you had said you would and the paper was what she had handed you to do it on. You had been writing every night since Heathrow — sixteen days now, sheet after sheet, mailed from airports and train stations and small post offices in towns whose names you could not pronounce. The bus had br...
Weekly Contest #352
And Still He woke to the particular silence of a room where someone used to be. The curtain moved once in the open window. He got up. The mors was on the counter in a glass pitcher, the color of dark cherries, beads of water already forming on its sides. He poured a glass and carried it toward the light. She was already at the railing when he opened the balcony door. She wore the robe he had seen over the chair the night before, the sash tied once and low. Her hands rested on the iron and she was looking out at something he couldn't yet see...
Weekly Contest #348
The photograph is bad. Grainy, taken at an angle, the colors flattened by whatever light they could get down there. You can make out a bison on its side, entrails suggested more than drawn. Beside it a figure — human, or meant to be — horizontal, arms stiff, a bird's head where a face should be. To the left, a stick with a bird perched on top of it. The bird is not doing anything. He is the only man painted in the cave. He is also the worst drawing in the entire cave. Nothing else like it appears anywhere. It was painted at the bottom of a s...
Weekly Contest #346
The embankment shouldn't have been there. Aleksei had worked this corridor twice before, checking survey markers for the pipeline company, and he knew the ground. Swamp to the north. Larch forest to the south. A service road that became a suggestion and then became nothing. He had turned the truck around at the same place both times, where the ruts filled with black water and the birch thinned to scrub. But the ground had changed. Or he had misread it. Either way, the embankment was there — a raised causeway of packed earth and gravel runnin...
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