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Weekly Contest #306
Parole Exhibit 3A: Toastmasters Acceptance Speech Transcript from Travis County Correctional Complex, Nathaniel “Dewey” Lawrence, Most Improved Inmate Thank you kindly for the accommodation. *laughs* Accommodation. Big words like that were never apart of my vocabulary before I was locked up. I always thought prison was gonna turn me dumber than I already was. Seems I owe Warden Jacobs an apology. Maybe then he’ll reconsider my sentence. *inmates laughing* Ok… here we go now. “Some things are too big to fail.” That’s a saying my mama used to...
Weekly Contest #303
“Here,” Andrea says as she pushes a spoon upon the lips of her husband Danny. The applesauce enters easy but bubbles up at the corner of his lip. There is a gray stain on his fading Toledo football shirt where the food has been collecting. Andrea cannot catch all the drippings, but this one she does, flicking a hand at the yellowed air without much focus behind it. The television hums a story that she is not following. Andrea goes for another scoop, but drops the spoon when she hears a knock in the living room. “Be right back,” she whispers...
Weekly Contest #286
Dear Eliza, The night is on fire, lucid and yellow against my window. I must inherit some blame here, for this would not be possible without my impressive collection of beeswax candles, but innocence runs muddy in both directions. You gifted me that first set, and you know how I am with gifts. “Like a squirrel with winter on his mind” – isn’t that what you said to me during that Christmas in Lewis? It’s alright, Eliza. It’s been too long for apt feelings. The drapes are catching flame, so I need to make this quick. I will not pretend that w...
Weekly Contest #282
Moogle’s Hi-Tow is not anyone’s favorite bar. They have a shallow selection of drinks, they don’t decorate for any holidays, the jukebox is a cache of 60’s folk hits, and the bartender (Burt Moogle himself) is at the age where work has become more of a hobby, a place to grump and snicker and scare away all but the most loyal of patrons. Tonight is Christmas Eve, however, and he breaks one of his rules. The store bell tings as Burt finishes draping up a set of multi-colored string lights across the ceiling. He pivots, alone and high on the l...
Weekly Contest #246
Mary Beth likes the feeling of everything nowadays. Her head has found a home in the crux of her boyfriend’s collarbone, and her new tennis shoes are just the right size, and the sky is open and blue as a robin’s egg. A blade of grass tickles the back of her neck as she traces a finger up above. “It’s a beautiful day,” she whispers. “Not as beautiful as you,” Farley tells her. He moves his hand from her waist to her breast. She is just sweet enough and just dumb enough to believe him. Mary Beth scoots her head up and looks at him. He has a...
Weekly Contest #245
The plane is halfway through the air when the windows start to dim. It’s a connect flight from Houston to Albuquerque and I’m sitting by the wing, dreaming about a conversation long ago. We lived in a shank shack out in the desert, a fifteen minute walk up a single lane road where no one could get to us. The realtor knocked ten percent off the asking price because there was no running water, so we had to use a well in the twenty-first century. Daddy saw that as a plus- thought all that walking would turn us into a real family, one worth its...
Weekly Contest #244
There it sat, in a framed glass on the windowsill that overlooked a spice garden and a sloppy view of the city. Mark never really noticed it, but he remembered it being there every time he washed the dishes, his hands moving brilliantly through the suds. Under stalks of parsley and coriander, his eyes would drift to it- its hard brown frame, the aged curl of the photo, his reflection peering ghostly over the two girls. Then it would disintegrate in his mind, into the hot, shifting clutter of his work, hiding until his sight reclaimed it the ...
Weekly Contest #239
The President is always the last to enter. The rest of the Council of Economic Advisers wait for him in mesh office chairs inherited from the Clinton era. Jeremy Evans can’t help but swivel back and forth- he is the only one not in a suit, and his chambray shirt has a ketchup stain near the front right pocket. He hopes nobody notices. “Who’s the guy with the ketchup stain?” a man across the round table asks. He’s wearing tortoise horned glasses and a small white hanky in his blazer. The accountant neighboring Jeremy speaks up. “Mr. Fra...
Weekly Contest #234
You push your husband’s chair across the grass, the wheels wearing tracks over bent green blades. The lawn is cut proper and square. You can tell because there are stripes that run up and down the lawn, stripes of lime and forest, two shades that are almost the same. “It’s a sign of health,” Frederick used to say. “Polo is best played on plaid.” And then he would jostle the belly of his horse, a crème-colored Arabian he’d imported from a Yemenite he rolled craps with, and gallop down the field. Bits of wind would grab at his graying black...
Weekly Contest #231
The Bishop Seymour Memorial Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana is a two hundred and fifty bed medical center. It employs 112 doctors, 401 nurses, 273 orderlies, 108 emergency responders, 52 janitors and fifteen receptionists. Only a few of them are happy. One of the 401 nurses on staff, Nurse Bradley, guides Nancy Peters across a two thousand square foot parking lot. In the morning, the lot is a sardine tin, but when visiting hours are over, the cars thin out, refusing adjacency. Right now, as the sun pulls behind the flat crimson roof (known...
Weekly Contest #230
The road is eternally paved, and the sky is eternally blue, and I’ve been sitting next to her forever. She has staple-sized dimples and green eyes and coarse red hair.An old rock song is playing, something with no bass, mostly guitar, so familiar that it irks me. The air is broken, and we sweat, a smell that contests my Black Ice pine tree. The smell is victorious. Her head turns, her lip quivers- I can see it in the window’s reflection. I won’t touch her because I don’t want glass in my car.It’s these highways that kill me. My urban plannin...
Weekly Contest #228
Topher’s mouth is the whir of a blender. Inside the blades, thick slabs of butter and sesame and crusty sourdough churn into an abominable, wet clump. Breadcrumbs pepper his cheeks and red hoodie like flakes of bronze, and in the dim wink of the restaurant, they shine against him. His hands are spiders- they devour, crack, splice another loaf into three bubbly pieces.“Mom, tell Toph to slow down.”She doesn’t hear me. Her gaze is elsewhere, swimming in the air, out of control. It lands on Daddy’s shoulders, the new shoulder pads in his three-...
Shortlisted for Contest #227 ⭐️
“Give me that thing” Chunhui grabs the cigarette from Bobby’s hand. There is a moment where their fingers touch, the warmest feeling in Alaska’s Northern Slope, and then it is gone. “No need to get handsy,” Bobby says to her. His voice is a dead whisper against the sweeping brown coastline, but she can hear him. They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on the dried-out vertebrae of a bowhead whale. “You wish, cheechako.” Her lips are around the filter now, pursed in a way he has never seen. Bobby is glad to be under six inches of parka- hi...
Weekly Contest #222
No one heard the commotion behind McLintock’s tonight. There wasn’t much to see- two drunk guys getting into it over nickel bets at the pool table. One was a heavyset townie. Probably construction, maybe firefighting. Smalltown pride with nothing to lose. The other was me, Bruce Villard. If they had known it’d turn into murder, then maybe there would have been a crowd. But who could have expected that? It was a one-in-a-million punch, a knockout clip that brought his head against the asphalt like those carny sledgehammers. I hear the wind ...
Weekly Contest #217
You are ten. School is starting. You wait at the bus stop, next to crops of milkweed that are beginning to blossom. Red beetles and monarchs crawl over the spiky pods. You try to catch them, but your fingers are stubby, and they flutter away before you can take ahold. Behind you, there is a steamy exhale as the yellow bus saddles up to the sidewalk. The diesel mixes in with the vanilla sky. You make one last snap at the orange butterfly, and as it flutters away, you realize you’ve never seen anything more beautiful. Until today. It is on ...
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