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Weekly Contest #372
It’s one o’clock in the morning. The glow of twelve screens lights the room in blues and reds and whites and every three or so minutes the radio beside me comes to life with ‘copy control’s’ or ‘truck down the portals’. I look up from my desk to the three large screens mounted on the far wall. The left shows the portal cameras and a handful of underground feeds, each in its own box. The centre displays the seismic monitoring system and weather maps around site. The right holds another grid of cameras, these ones looking inside the twelve ref...
Weekly Contest #371
I need you to concentrate. Focus for the next five to ten minutes, for the love of Jebus and Loki and Sheogorath and Nicolas Cage, and everything holy online, read these words aloud. This happened. It is a true story that happened to a Friend of an Uncle’s Cousin’s Kid.Daniel was sitting on a bench outside of the Belvidere rest stop, Red bull and meat pie in hand, when he saw her. Otsu, she was driving a red ford focus and Nicole was playing around with the radio as they pulled up to refuel. He watched them, spilling tomato sauce down the fr...
Weekly Contest #370
It was raining outside. Every few minutes there was thunder. Inside the house it was cozy and the air conditioner on the far wall above the bookshelf exhaled a warm breath in silence. The husband sat on the couch with a scotch. He drank it neat. His wife poured herself a glass of Merlot from a bottle with a clownfish on the label. “What would you like me to cook tonight?” she asked. “Rendang.” “I can make rendang.” She sat beside him and placed her glass on the coffee table. “Not like that,” he said. “You always use a coaster.” The wife nodd...
Weekly Contest #367
What does humanity have permission to do to individual humans in order to ensure humanity survives? ** Seven years ago, Ark: Varaha was home to more than four hundred thousand people. Only a fraction of those escaped The Closure.No human has entered Varaha since. Nor has any human left.We know not everyone left onboard was infected. We do not know how many survived the first month after the doors were sealed. We do not know how many survived the first year, nor do we know if anyone aboard is alive today.What follows is not an attempt to answ...
Weekly Contest #366
I fought beside a man called Robert Jordan when I volunteered in Ukraine.I usually lead with that. I don’t tell them he died until later. First I give them the summer of twenty-twenty-four. Borscht in foxholes. Every now and then they need convincing so I tell them yes, they really serve borscht near the front.I’ll show them the old bloodstained Australian flag patch in my wallet after I’ve told them about the International Legion. They want danger and adventure. To believe that exciting things happen when I’m around.Why’d you go? is usually...
Weekly Contest #364
I’ve had good moments in my life. I’ve had more horrible ones. I know you want me to start from the beginning, but there are two beginnings. You already know the first. The second happened last Friday when I was cleaning the cupboards. I started on one, it hadn’t been opened in years, the one beneath the stairs, where everything goes when neither of us can bring ourselves to throw it away. There was an old birthday present we never got a chance to give, nor had the heart to get rid of...You know our story. At least what was reported twenty-t...
Shortlisted for Contest #362 ⭐️
How much fruit is too much?How do you know if it’s not enough?Do kids still eat muesli bars? Is peanut butter banned? Did I cut the sandwich wrong? Should I leave a note? Is that weird? Do dads… stepdads leave notes?I never thought these would be the questions keeping me awake at night in my thirties. Never thought a peanut butter sandwich would be more intimidating than a mortgage.They were the questions I married into.One day I was deciding where to take this beautiful, amazing woman on a first date, and before I knew it there was a six-ye...
Weekly Contest #359
The nurses knew her by sight. Every Thursday at three o’clock, she would arrive carrying the same worn leather handbag and wearing the same grey coat, regardless of the weather. She would sign the visitor register, smile politely at reception, and make her way down the corridor to Room 18.Nobody questioned it anymore. Why would they?“You’re here to see Frank?” one of the nurses asked as she passed.Sarah just smiled. “That’s right.”The nurse returned the smile. It was the same smile they always gave her. Warm. Sympathetic. A smile reserved fo...
Weekly Contest #328
The air used to taste of rain. Now it tasted of copper and dust.We had been warned, of course. For centuries. The satellites sang the same melody, year after year, the rising carbon, dying algae, oceans blooming red with organisms that ate what they should have only tasted. It should have been obvious. But we were too proud to stop. Too distracted by profit and progress, and the soft narcotic of thinking we had time. We chose to be oblivious.I record this now from what’s left of the Northern Hemisphere. Our towers are empty. The atmosphere d...
Weekly Contest #309
The kettle clicked off. Margot, hands slightly shaking, reached for the chipped floral teapot with the kind of reverence reserved for sacred things. Two cups. One sugar in his, none in hers. Just like always. She shuffled across the room with slow, careful steps. Harold was already waiting, sitting up straight in his chair, trousers freshly pressed, hair combed to one side. A gentleman. “Afternoon tea,” she announced, offering him his cup with a soft smile. “You always make it just right,” Harold said, his eyes crinkling. “You spoil me.” Mar...
Weekly Contest #308
He stepped out into the washed-out light of a winter afternoon, boots sinking into black, rain-softened earth. The kind that clung to your soles and didn’t let go. Behind him, the bush whispered, not with wind, but with memory. Damp eucalypt, distant crows, the smell of wood rot and something older beneath it.The others were gone. Lost, maybe. Or had he left them?Three days, I muttered. Three bloody days, and not a soul in sight.He had come inland with maps and a rifle, a man tasked with “opening up” country for a settler’s road.. though no ...
Weekly Contest #307
I didn’t believe in ghosts. At least not in the way whitefellas talk about them.To my professors, spirits were metaphors. Cautionary tales for primitive minds.But to my people, to the Noongar, spirits were real.Sometimes sleeping. Sometimes walking. Sometimes watching.But always there.So when I saw the artifact in the museum flyer, I knew exactly what it was. Ngarlu-Kurr. A black stone. Swollen. Intimidating.Unearthed by BarrowCorp miners near the Porongurup Range. Now on display in Perth, under halogen lights.They called it the Warding Ston...
Weekly Contest #306
Prelude: The Forgotten War of the East Oftentimes, the Second World War is remembered as a European conflict—an arena of white armies, white victims, white heroes. We are taught to chart its beginning from 1939, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. We learn of Nazi death camps, Allied resistance, and the fall of Berlin as if the world outside Europe were only a backdrop.Japan is mentioned—briefly. Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, maybe the Rape of Nanjing if the syllabus is generous. But even then, Japan is cast as an antagonist whose atrocities are co...
Winner of Weekly Contest #300 🏆
I’m a miner. I dig holes for a living. ‘Dig’ is a generous word, really. I blow things up so we can go deeper. Drill, charge, blast then bog it out. Then repeat. It’s loud, dirty, and dangerous. But it’s honest work, and there’s a rhythm to it, one that makes sense. Until the day it didn’t The mine is called Kalgara Deep, carved beneath the sun-blasted hills of Western Australia, three hours from the nearest servo, and six from anything you could call a town. It’s not on any tourist map. Just a dot behind a red dirt road lined with scrub and...
Weekly Contest #299
I swear it wasn’t my fault.Okay, yes, I was standing in the middle of the Queen’s botanical garden at three in the morning, covered head to toe in goose feathers, holding what appeared to be the missing ceremonial orb of Saint Winifred, and yelling something about the moon being a hologram. But if you just give me one minute—just one—I can explain everything.It all started with a pigeon. A very suspicious pigeon.I was walking home from work. Mind you, this was a normal Tuesday. No prophecies, no strange lights in the sky. Just me, a sad litt...
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