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Weekly Contest #321
The desert never really sleeps. It hums. A low, static buzz beneath the stars, the kind of noise you only notice when everything else stops. Out here, just past midnight on the I-15, even the billboards look like they’re dreaming. She keeps one hand on the wheel and the other wrapped around a gas station iced tea that’s mostly melted now—watered down and over-sweet, like everything else that used to mean something. The air conditioner gave up around Victorville, so she’s got the windows down. Desert wind slips in like a ghost and sticks to h...
SESSION 1 GAVIN: "Alright, gang, let’s anchor in. Bodies optional, but presence required. No interrupting, no unauthorized teleporting, and keep your tethers wrapped around at least one ankle. Let’s start with check-ins." RACHEL: "Still won’t drink tap water. My fridge hum sounds like the pre-suck sequence. I keep unplugging it but it finds power from somewhere." LUNA: "Blood’s still kombucha. Tried donating again—they told me to go to Erewhon and never come back." STORM: "There’s a dimmer switch in my spine now. I control mood lighting with...
Weekly Contest #320
The first thing Rosita noticed was how quiet it was. Not peaceful—quiet, like a theater moments after the curtain drops. The pines stood half-charred and silent, their trunks blackened and flaking like the pages of an old book left too close to a candle. No birdsong. Just crows circling above, drifting lazy spirals into a sun still smeared with smoke. She told the ranger at the base station she was “just hiking,” and he nodded, but his eyes held the kind of softness that meant he didn’t believe her and didn’t press it either. No one came her...
ACT I : The Mania - The Forest - The BecomingI was born under a redwood tree, or at least I told the EMT that when they found me barefoot and singing. They wrapped me in a blanket like I was breakable, but I was still vibrating from the storm inside me. I’d been chasing moonlight through the ferns for three nights—maybe five. I lost count after the stars started winking at me like they were in on the secret. I told the ravens they could perch on my shoulders. I told the spiders their webs were maps. I told God I forgave her. They say the woo...
I did not know I was alive. Not in the way she was—warm-blooded and wind-chapped, sighing into the moss as though the earth might answer back. I was breathless. Rootless. Dreaming in spores. I was hunger and rot and rebirth, woven through the bones of redwoods, pulsing beneath the wet loam. I remembered everything, and nothing at all. Then she stepped into me. Boot heel against damp ground. A hush of motion in the tangled green. Her presence lit the soil like a match. I felt her before I understood her. She pressed down the ferns with cauti...
I didn’t mean to hike to the Hollywood sign. I’d meant to take a nap. Or maybe cry in the Rite Aid parking lot. But I missed the turn on Franklin and just kept driving—windows down, radio off, the city grinding like a slow migraine in the distance. My body was on autopilot, but something deeper was steering. And when I hit the last legal parking spot at the edge of Beachwood Canyon, I cut the engine and sat still. The sun leaned low and swollen behind me. It was late enough that the light had gone that dusty gold LA is famous for—too beautif...
I didn’t clock out. I left my stethoscope in the sink, floated past the nurses’ station, and walked out the double doors without turning back. Somewhere behind me, a monitor was shrieking and someone else would silence it. My scrubs still smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee. My pulse thudded in my ears like a warning I chose not to hear. By the time I reached the edge of Yosemite, the sky had gone pale with cloud and my knuckles ached from the cold. January was supposed to be snow-heavy and still. That’s what I’d wanted: something clean...
Weekly Contest #319
The sun hangs over Joshua Tree like a severed head, golden and godless, watching. Opal walks between rusted stalls and tarp-fluttered tables, her boots crunching through gravel like old bones. Everything smells like sun-warmed vinyl, oranges going soft in the heat, and the ghost of gas fumes. The wind drags dust across her skin like a prayer that won’t be answered. It’s been a year since the crash. A whole calendar cycle since her Toyota spun out on a forgotten road and folded like an insect against a Joshua tree trunk. Three other bodies we...
The desert made her angry. Rachel stepped out of the rental car and squinted through the heat shimmer, regretting everything: the flight from Boston, the motel soap stinging her eyes, the email from her editor that started this whole descent into woo-woo hell. And now—this? A flying saucer-shaped building in the middle of nowhere, with a chalkboard out front offering “cosmic recalibration & solar harmonics.” Jesus. The Integratron stood like a sugar pill hallucination. White dome. Perfect symmetry. Not a line out of place, like it was bu...
The salon opens at ten, but I awaken before the lights flicker on. I feel the sun through the smudged glass of the storefront—the real sun, too far away to matter. Here, in this suburban pocket of Los Angeles where the air smells like pink bubblegum and exhaustion, no one wants the real thing. They want me. They want the version of themselves they imagine beneath my lid. Bronze. Glossy. Invincible. And I give it to them. Every time. I know them all. The bride-to-be with the uneven arms who cries when she thinks no one hears. The teen who rea...
The foothills were already breathing smoke again. Enya stepped off the transport with her boots hitting the red dirt like war drums—slow, deliberate, scarred. The air tasted like cedar and mourning, like something that had already burned and was waiting to do it again. She paused at the edge of the fireline, staring out at the treebones curled in silhouette. The sun hung low behind a veil of ash. Everything was golden and ghost-colored. She didn’t flinch when the wind kicked soot into her face. She’d been kissed harder by fire. The others un...
They saw her first in the side mirror of a pickup truck. A smear of green and bone, stepping from the treeline like fog with a pulse. Seven years gone, and Wren came back barefoot—moss trailing behind her like the hem of a wedding dress gone to ruin. No one moved. Not at the gas station. Not in the diner. Not even in church. Word passed quiet as wildfire: Wren’s back. Wren’s walking. Wren’s alive. Except—she wasn’t. Not the way they understood it. Her skin gleamed damp and soft, all bark-brown and bruised-green. Tiny mushrooms bloomed from ...
Weekly Contest #318
Neptune’s trailer smelled like burnt sugar and the last page of a library book. She was elbow-deep in cosmic frosting, dyed eclipse-blue and glittering with edible stardust, spinning cupcakes like small planets for someone else’s big moment. Outside, the 29 Palms sky simmered in pink and rust, the sun leaking over rusted car parts and prayer flags, casting long shadows that twitched like they had secrets. The desert had been whispering all morning. Neptune heard it in the hum of the generator, in the way the wind kept flipping her tarot deck...
The couch was the last thing. Everything else had been picked apart, packed, or posted. She’d left the tarot deck, taken the blender, and ghosted the houseplant with a sticky note that read “You deserve better.” But the couch — crushed red velvet with cigarette burns in the armrest — had stayed. Like it was waiting. She listed it on Craigslist with no caption, just: free. you haul it. She expected no one. Maybe a flaky reply, maybe her ex in a new hoodie, pretending they were still friends. Instead, he showed up. Not early, not late. Just th...
Most people only find the Moonlight Motel after they’ve already lost something important — time, a memory, someone they loved, or a version of themselves they can’t seem to properly grieve. It doesn’t show up on GPS. The road that leads to it isn’t paved, or even named. One moment you’re driving across the Mojave with sweat on your upper lip and static on the radio... and next thing you know, you blink and it’s there: a glowing oasis off the shoulder of nowhere, pulsing faintly under the weight of starlight. The air around it tastes like ozo...
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