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Weekly Contest #279
Always South The burning timber, the orange light, the tree shadows, I had forgotten warmth completely, and here it was again. I hugged myself and stood, rotating my body, warming myself all over and evenly. Then I laid on my back and held my feet out toward the flames until they were too warm, then I held them a little longer before cooling them down in the snow as I stood. The sizzle of snow melting, by the flames, was like the drawing of a dozen bows across a dozen perfectly tuned violins. &nb...
The Harvest’s Words Whenever it rained the downtown streets smelled like wet dogs. And that made the bars smell like kill-shelters. They were the best shopping places if you could stand the odor. Saturday nights at Bad Dad’s, that was my spot. I’d seen enough TV before the plague to know that I couldn’t shop every week, or even every month. I forced myself to space it out to twelve, maybe thirteen times a year. I made my stores last. 200,000 dead after the first summer. We buried the ...
Bone Corner Suicide Sickness hit the high-country hard as an ice storm and silent as a blight. Too frequently my rides into town were blocked by processions of mourners. The burials had turned to bonfires. The survivors circled the departed, howling around the flames. The ash only made it about a mile from the ceremonies before settling on stilled vehicles and once white windowsills. The snows didn’t wash it away, it clumped, and it dripped, and it stained everything gray. Burn-burials, as they called them, happe...
Weekly Contest #88
Glenda Scott was the product of violence, deceit, and one man’s almost immortal cruelty. Scott wasn’t her father’s name. Nor did it belong to her mother. It was a pseudonym given to her to disguise her identity. River was her mother’s name. She was sought and killed high up on a mountain by her husband, who did not father Glenda, but felt betrayed by her conception. Glenda knew pure happiness before her mother’s murder, and she would find it again, but not before she dis...
Weekly Contest #84
The Pop-up Camp I collect fishhooks whenever I find them. I string them like a beautiful curtain between two trees. There are many ways out of my camp. You can run one way and get the hooks. You can jump out into the reservoir and swim away. Some people try to go back the way they came in, back on the old hiker’s trail. The reservoir is huge now that the dams don’t work. It’s deep in the middle and rocky at the edges. Diving is a real bad idea, but it’s an idea that come...
Weekly Contest #83
It's only a prison if you want out. Then, once released, it was an overwhelming sense of misanthropy that drove me to wildness. I moved into the van initially to avoid murdering my new landlord and two neighbors. For half a decade, before my imprisonment, I maintained a front that earned me top dollar from my clients. All the while to earn those dollars I had to divulge secrets complete with verifiable evidence. I made a lot of money and ruined a lot of lives during that...
Weekly Contest #82
Serialized Identification Numerals: 00881 Observational Report—Earth—Lunar Rotation 3: I am now able to successfully imitate one of the human species’ most common behaviors, they call it sitting down. Observing the human species of earth is my primary protocol. Secondary and tertiary protocols are experimental behavioral imitation and cultural assimilation, respectively. (Mission note to the Designer regarding all future protocol upgrades: Imitation of behavior, without successful assimilation of local culture, has resul...
Weekly Contest #80
Lights Over The Inpatient Facility By Matt Keating 1990 Words "Major Briggs, share for us, if you would, your impressions of what you're seeing there." "Tammy, after seven years as a doctor and fifteen years in the army, I can say without hesitation that this is the most horrifying combination of events that I have ever witnessed any-" "Colonel, did we lose you? Can you hear me? We have begun to experience the electrical interference that we were warned may be possible when the lights first appeared. We seem to have lost contact wit...
Weekly Contest #74
In the time it took to unplug the old jukebox, Polly pushed her empty glass to the floor then she chased it with a shot of bourbon. -That time she made Pete walk home from the gas station because he refused to go in and buy her peanut butter cups and a pack of Camels, that time she locked Pete out of his house in a towel because he received a text from Maddy who sometimes worked banquets, and that time she tossed his wallet in the lake because the poem he read her...
Weekly Contest #73
Cold Bird Christmas by Matt Keating “Mutually assured destruction,” is not a phrase traditionally found in Christmas sentiments. Nick considered this omission by the carol composers to be unfortunate. He intended to notate this observation if he managed to survive the violent and rather capricious petulance rattling above the corner bookshelves. Nicholas was born old and without imagination. His toys were irrelevant. He was given a stuffed animal once; a lion he named Lion, but Lion was just a soft thing. Nicholas never spoke...
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