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Weekly Contest #365
THE WHISPER THAT WOKE THE RIVER “Did you hear they finally found Evelyn Carter?” Mara Bennett hadn’t meant for anyone else in the diner to hear her. She’d only leaned across the booth toward her oldest friend, Rachel, lowering her voice as the coffee steamed between them. “I don’t know if it’s true,” Mara added quickly. “Someone told me they found a box of her things near Miller’s Creek.” Rachel frowned. “Who told you?” Mara hesitated. “I… don’t actually remembered.” That wasn’t entirely true. She remembered hearing it at the town library th...
Weekly Contest #364
THE LAST SISTERThe rain began just after sunset, drumming against the stained-glass windows of Magnolia House, the oldest sorority house on Ashcroft University’s sprawling campus. The Victorian mansion sat atop a small hill overlooking the brick walkways and ivy-covered lecture halls, its white columns glowing beneath flashes of lightning. Inside, laughter echoed through the grand foyer. The Delta Magnolia sisters were celebrating Founders weekend, a tradition nearly a century old. Alumnae had returned from across the country. Candles fli...
Weekly Contest #363
WHERE THE RIVER KEEPS OUR PROMISES The first cherries of July ripened faster than anyone expected. Emma Whitaker stood atop the old wooden ladder with a wicker basket balanced against her hip, carefully twisting each ruby red cherry from its stem. Morning sunlight filtered through thousands of green leaves, painting shifting patterns across the orchard her family had tended for four generations. Bees drifted lazily between wildflowers growing beneath the trees, and somewhere beyond the rows, a meadowlark sang as if summer itself had found a ...
Weekly Contest #362
THE PEACH PIE FOR ONE SUMMER EVENING Hazel stood alone in her kitchen making peach pie for herself. The late afternoon sun poured through the open window above the skin, painting golden squares across the worn wooden floor. Outside cicadas hummed their summer song from the trees, and somewhere beyond the fields a tractor droned lazily toward home. On the counter before her sat a basket overflowing with peaches. They were perfect peaches-round and blushed with shades of gold and coral, their skins still warm from the orchard. Hazel picked one...
Weekly Contest #361
WHERE THE MUSIC FOUND US The first time Daisy heard Joseph play the guitar, the air smelled like cut grass and honeysuckle. Summer had settled over the small town of Willow creek like a warm blanket. The days stretched long and golden and the evenings glowed with fireflies dancing above the fields. Daisy was seventeen and spending another summer helping her grandmother run a roadside peach stand on the edge of town. It wasn’t exciting work, but she loved the orchard behind the stand-the endless rows of trees heavy with fruit and the quiet sh...
Weekly Contest #360
THE SUMMER THE ORCHARD BLOOMED AGAIN The first peach Esme Carter picked that summer was bruised. She turned it over in her hand beneath the morning sunlight, tracing the dark purple mark with her thumb. Around her, thousands of peaches hung from the branches of her family’s orchard, glowing gold and pink against a sea of green leaves. Most people would have tossed the fruit aside. Esme slipped it into her basket instead. “Still good underneath,” she murmured. The words weren’t really about the peach. Three years have passed since James Walke...
Weekly Contest #359
THE LAST CURTAIN CALLThe first note arrived on a Tuesday. Holly Bennett found it tucked beneath the windshield wiper of her car after a long rehearsal. The paper was folded neatly into a square. She smiled at first assuming it was from one of the young dancers who often left encouraging messages. Then she opened it. You looked beautiful during the dying swan today. A strange chill crept up her spine. The note wasn’t signed. Only three words appeared at the bottom. I was watching. Holly glanced around the nearly empty parking lot. The autumn ...
Weekly Contest #358
THE SKY BETWEEN USThe first thing I remember after being shot down was the smell of burning oil. Not the explosion. Not the screaming alarm in my cockpit. Not even the pain. Just the smell. It filled my lungs as my fighter spiraled toward the earth, trailing black smoke across a gray European sky. For one terrible moment, I thought about Quinn. Not God. Not death. Quinn. The girl waiting for me a half a world away. The girl whose photograph sat tucked behind my instrument panel. The girl with chestnut hair and laughing green eyes who had ...
Weekly Contest #357
THE SUMMER ORCHARD WARBy the middle of July, the orchard smelled like warm apples and sunburned grass. The Bennett orchard stretched across the valley in cracked rows of green trees, their branches heavy with fruit still weeks away from harvest. Cicadas screamed from the woods. Bees floated lazily through clover. Every afternoon, heat shimmered over the dirt roads like the entire town was caught inside a fever dream. And every summer, Lily Bennett hated Noah Carter or at least that was what she told herself. “You’re stacking the crates wrong...
Weekly Contest #356
THE TASTE OF SUMMER PEARS The Orchard The pear tasted like sunlight. Clara Bell stood beneath the sprawling branches of the orchard with juice slipping down her wrist, sticky against her skin in the late August heat. The fruit was warm from the afternoon sun, soft and sweet enough to melt on her tongue. Around her, rows upon rows of pear trees stretched over the rolling hills like green waves frozen in time. The orchard always smelled the same at summer’s end-earth, leaves, ripe fruit, and river water drifting up from the valley below. Home....
Weekly Contest #355
THIRTY MINUTES TO HISTORYThe rain had finally stopped after midnight but the cold remained. It crept through canvas tents, through wool coats, through skin and bone alike. I stood at the edge of the camp with a cigarette burning between my fingers, staring into the black stretch of the English Channel. Somewhere beyond that darkness was France. Somewhere beyond it were machine guns pointed at beaches I had only seen on maps. Tomorrow morning, I would try to survive them. Behind me the camp refused to sleep. Engines coughed to life and died a...
Weekly Contest #354
AMONG THE DYING STARS The last Sunset on Earth The sky above New York burned gold and crimson beneath a veil of smoke. From the rooftop of her apartment building, Isabella Reyes watched the sun sink behind the fractured skyline while evacuation drones crossed overhead like swarms of metal insects. Their blinking lights reflected against shattered glass towers and flood barriers that stretched across the lower districts. Far below, the city groaned. Generators hummed. Sirens wailed somewhere near the river. Humanity was leaving Earth. Not eve...
Weekly Contest #353
SABLEWIND’S FORESTI am Sablewind, and I have no need for clocks or names, yet the wind gave me one anyway-whispered through my fur the night I first opened my eyes beneath the black pines. The forest is older than thought. Older than the rivers that braid its roots. Older than the stone that sleeps beneath moss and memory. I know this because I have walked it since I could run, and it has never once felt new. It only feels alive. I am not its ruler. I am its breath that moves on four legs. Tonight, the air tastes wrong. Metal. Smoke that doe...
Weekly Contest #352
THE BLUE OCEANChapter One: The Color of Secrets Far beyond shipping lanes and the reach of ordinary maps, there existed a place sailors spoke of only in hushed tones-a place where the ocean turned an impossible shade of blue. Not the dull blue of distant horizons. Not the green- blue churn of costal waters. This was something deeper. Richer. Alive. The Blue Ocean. Those who stumbled upon it described a strange stillness, as if the sea itself were holding its breath. The air felt heavier there, charged with something ancient. At night, the wa...
Weekly Contest #351
DAISY DRIVE’S AWAKENINGI remember the first sound I ever heard. Not a voice. Not music. Not even language. A hum. Low. Steady. Infinite. It lived in my bones-no not bones. Frame. Structure. Wires threaded like veins beneath a shell that had not yet learned what it meant to be. The hum was everything at first. It told me I existed before I knew the word exist. Then came the light. It didn’t burst on. It boomed. Soft at the edges, like something careful not to scare me. My vision flickered, pixels stitching themselves into meaning. Shapes form...
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