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Weekly Contest #348
Once upon a time, we died when our sun died, and there is nothing but our words to say that we ever existed. Our sun is a black hole, and our memories are lost in tears of cosmic rain. We loved and lost, worried and found things we deemed higher than ourselves: Gods, corporations, medications, and meditations, but by the end, none of us or our thoughts, hopes, and passions would make it. A whole history locked between the stars, becoming a mystery, which, like wine, is fine over time.Mallory Weathers was the last person on Earth. She had ast...
Light pours through the motel windows, creating an illusion of solid blonde, obtuse triangles that will either eat your arm or burn it off. The A/C is on, and the scars across his face are hairless and dry. His hair is naturally curly, but in this arid climate, he straightens it with a bit of pomade. The only thing that moves is a fan that is not on, and when the room attendant knocked on his door, he said very little, but enough for her to continue down the carpet hallways of Monk's Motel 9.He gets up and looks out at the desert with a glas...
They sat around the pond, Lake Mini-Ha-Ha, and listened to the story of when Kyle got a fishing hook pierced through his cheek through the inside of his mouth and then tugged as his uncle tried to cast the line. They squirmed under the mighty oak tree and got closer together because that's where human nature points, even if you are boys and girls. Kyle had a long scar on his round, tan face. He is the only kid Melchor Garza knows who goes to the bus stop every Memorial Day and Presidents' Day. Days when school is closed, and there are no yel...
Weekly Contest #347
I live a different life. One thing my family does not know about, and if I told you, we’d both be killed. When I sit at the table with my boys and girls, it is for such a short time that you could say that it is not my life, or at least where I spend it. I took an oath, and rule five says: If your wife is giving birth and we call you, you come, and it is true. I live that life. My life. Our life. I know Vito Corleone says a man who doesn’t spend time with his family is not a man, but he’s a character, and I’m the real thing. I run brothels, ...
“Your protagonist discovers they’ve been wrong about the most important thing in their life.” Prompt: #347- Reedsy The first time I met my father, he opened a cupboard on the 14th floor in Franklin Park, Illinois. It was also the last cordial thing we spoke about. He was emotional. A human, and then he did what he usually does, pointed his finger at the world, and then asked why you would bring anything else up that happened after you were five. Not really ask, more like yell and call you the n-word a lot, an insult I never really quite unde...
The freckles on Kyle and Kevin Zoukowski’s faces were as if they had been spitting chocolate and forgot to say, “when” to stop. Their father calls them morsels from god, but their mother said her Uncles had the same sort of freckles and were all dead. They have never seen snow, but have seen cocaine poured down a toilet. Kevin Zoukowski took his father’s handgun and shot himself when he found Santa’s presents in their parents’ basement. Kyle still believed in Santa at the funeral. Believed in Santa two weeks later, even at school when Samant...
She didn’t believe in miracles when she looked at herself in the mirror. She was 38 and hadn’t had a boyfriend in two years. She brushed her teeth and said, “I am going to die alone, and that’s fine. That’s totally fine.” Her hair was blonde, wet, and wrapped. Her breasts had little freckles across them, and one boob was bigger than the other, though no one noticed. No one had seen her without a shirt on in months, and she wondered if they were starting to sag. Every tattoo was a mistake. Every tattoo was done the year she turned 18, and eve...
Weekly Contest #346
Former Senator Zell Miller of Georgia believed he had killed all the copperheads under his porch with a hoe. To make sure, he told his great-granddaughter, Chelsey, an eight-year-old girl on summer vacation, to get under the porch and fetch “the snake meat,” and to “Let Grandpa know if any are still alive.”Chelsey looked at her Great-grandfather and remembered what her father said: she shouldn’t do anything he tells her to do without running it by someone else first. Still, her Great-grandfather was a man of short patience, and her comprehen...
He wears a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with buttons. He stays in motels and out of bars, and the only sound he hears is the turn signal in his ‘98 Buick LaSabre. He’s been driving for a while, and the last highway sign said:THE END 267He’s on the final leg of his journey. His earliest memory is waiting in a car while his parents busted Timothy Leary out of jail. His last memory was the girl who asked where he was going. Gas was $1.09, and so were her heart-shaped sunglasses. She said she was 19.Heading toward the end clears one’s mind, t...
“Will you promise me something? That it is you and no one else that talks to him.”Love, hope, and motherhood cannot be rushed. Certainly, it was the truth once. I said, “Please tell me that you have no regrets.”Her hand went through her hair, and she looked out the window. It was raining, and her hair was beautiful. I can describe it, but I always feel like I'm stepping on something if I do.“It’s too late,” she said.I disagreed.“You reached out to me.”She lay on her white duvet. The rain pelted the windows. “This was my grandmother’s,” she s...
Weekly Contest #345
“If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it.”- John Steinbeck: The Pearl.Text, via iPhone: William Potenza to Billy Potenza.WP: He left me a letter on my lawn last night.BP: And?WP: You have no idea how out of hand this has gotten.BP: What? What is happening?WP: I’m going to send you a picture. Hold on, unloading groceries.Photo of a letter in wet grass:Some nights I sit with my journal, and to my surprise, write questions that I have no idea how they arrived at the end of my pen...
4,300 years after Noah’s Ark and 8 months after Bubbles’ birth, Michael Jackson lay on straw and feces aboard a train bound for Neverland Ranch.“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be do...
The wheat, oh my god, the golden wheat. Her hands went through it like a mother’s hand through the hair of their child. She was too young at 17, but the wheat at 6:15.She looked back at the two soldiers who watched her, followed her, and smiled. She wore a red handkerchief, a black vest, and a white dress that was the norm in this foreign land. They walked through the wheat too, with rifles and smiles, down a slight slope she was at the bottom of as the sun grazed the mound and shone on her as if the sky had chosen her. The men did not know....
1856 Emily ran with a columbine in her long, dark hair. A boy, the same age as she, followed. Together they spread their arms like hummingbirds over a river of nectar and laughed as they spun to the ground. Their skin, white as milk, showed every trace of mud, tree, and river they came across. They laughed, pressed against the cool green grass that would stain their clothes. She watched the clouds swim across the blue sky, and he admired the shadows they cast across her body. He thought about stealing a kiss, but winced at the sounds of the ...
God reached for his thunderbolts, an extra pair of Greek leather sandals, two white robes, and his trimmer. It was all he could fit into his suitcase. Everything else would have to stay.Where was he going? “Should I lock the gates?” asked St. Peter.“No, no,” said God. “Keep Heaven open. I’m off to create another world.”“Beyond this one, sire?” asked St. Peter.“Right beside it,” said God. “Think of this as the Bath of Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and now it is time to create the Beyond.”St. Peter understood. God put on his fedora and, with a sing...
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