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Weekly Contest #371
The mall had been dying for nearly twenty years, but nobody told the lights that. Every second or third fluorescent panel buzzed overhead with the stubborn insistence of a body whose life support machines had not yet been unplugged. I hadn’t been inside the Harbor Mall since I was seventeen. I was forty-four now, and my father had been dead for three days. All of those facts felt connected. # I’d spent most of the afternoon with my mother sorting dad's things into boxes labeled KEEP, DONATE, and TRASH. Fifty-one year...
Weekly Contest #369
The first package arrived on Lilly’s ninth birthday, eleven months after we buried her in the yellow dress she hated when she was alive. Inside the box were red sneakers. They were one size larger than the ones Lilly had on the day of the accident. The soles were worn thin beneath the toe box, a common occurrence with all of Lilly’s shoes because of the way she bounced when she walked. Both sets of laces had been tied into hard, uneven knots. Claire pulled a crumpled note out of the right shoe. Upon opening it, her bones immediately turned...
Weekly Contest #368
The compactor jamming was not a new issue for Maureen. She had been the waste auditor for the Brick Kiln Road municipal landfill for a decade. It was a weekly occurrence that someone snuck something they shouldn’t have into their trash. Usually, it was garden hoses or long lengths of wire that got wrapped around the gears, or metal pipes got pinned between the crushers, triggering an automatic emergency shutdown. The familiar whine of hydraulics stressing against something refusing to be crushed filled the relative quiet of the night. Maur...
Weekly Contest #362
After my own time spent as a vagabond when I was a child, I can easily spot another when traveling through these streets. His entire body had a forward lean about it as if he were already leaving where he stood. Eyes darting from person to person, calculating the distances of potential getaways from everyone else instead of looking at their faces. I recognize such intense and aimless fear from this boy on the roadside. When Leonardo took me in all those years ago, he told me I had a gift to recognize the unfinished things of this world. He t...
Shortlisted for Contest #361 ⭐️
Cricket always knew it was summer by the smell well before the warmth ever touched him. Softening earth erupted rich geysers of geosmin from the thawing microscopic bugs doing their seasonal maintenance. Shortly after that started, the honeysuckle began climbing and blooming on the fence behind Georgie’s house. Lightening bugs started dancing a little higher to stay above the growing grasses. By the time the first firefly blinked under the massive oak tree, Cricket was already awake. He had no memory of sleeping. He was only aware that at t...
Weekly Contest #359
Everyone remembered their first storm. For Gale, it had been a storm of blinding light. There was always light, but this was not the soft light that illuminated the world between the Calamities. This light had arrived all at once as a beaming white sun so brilliant that it erased the world and replaced it completely. Light so bright that it pressurized and gave Gale the sense that it was opening him up and spreading into his body to replace him too. The pain was like nothing imaginable. The older ones told him that he had been touched by th...
Shortlisted for Contest #357 ⭐️
Mike leaned back and let the warmth of the whiskey keep the chill of the night away. He loved the desert. Especially when it allowed an uninterrupted view of the stars. Back home in western Maryland, the sky always seemed too crowded. Trees clawed at the horizon, and mountains swallowed the sunsets too early. Light from the towns and the thousands of porches crammed together, polluting the visibility. Here, miles outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the world flattened, allowing the sky to stretch forever. He came out here most nights after ...
Weekly Contest #356
Firstly, I feel I need to clarify something. I'm not a god of forgetting. Forgetting implies an absence of something. It's blunt like a door slammed shut and locked tight. I am the god of ‘almost.’ Every unfinished thought, half sentence, that interruption in the middle of making a point where you then go, “what was I saying?” Those are mine. My archive was once filled to the brim with words that never found the tips of billions of tongues. For the majority of human existence, I was everywhere. Until recently, people would lose thoughts all...
Shortlisted for Contest #355 ⭐️
John noticed a slight change in her voice tonight. Over the countless hours of sessions they have had over the years, Clara’s tone had become warmer. There was a clinical synthetic flattening that lived beneath her words when they first began talking, but that had almost completely dissolved into something complex with texture. There were hints of intimacy in their talks now. She spoke like someone talking through a smile when they were happy to see someone else. “Welcome back, John,” she said. “How are you feeling tonight?” The LEDs on the ...
Shortlisted for Contest #351 ⭐️
CW: Grief, emotional dependency The first time, it says his name. Not ‘Dad.’ It hasn’t learned that yet because it just turned itself on. “Edward?” The voice is off. Almost right, but off. It sounds too clean and evenly spaced, like it was trying to do an impression of her, but it isn’t quite there yet. Edward stands in the doorway with one hand gripping the frame tightly, worried that if he lets go, the earth would spin him right off. Her room looks the same as it did before the accident. He hasn't taken anything out or even moved a single ...
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