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Weekly Contest #343
Lena had spent most of her life learning how not to show her teeth. It began early. A kindergarten teacher pressing two fingers lightly to her chin and saying, “Gentle smiles.” An aunt laughed when Lena snapped at a cousin and murmured, “Good girls don’t bare their teeth.” A boyfriend in college who told her she looked “feral” when she argued. After a while, she learned the mechanics of restraint. Lips together. Jaw relaxed. Breathe steady. Whatever rose inside her — anger, hunger, heat — could be managed if she softened the mouth first. Dan...
Nassau, 1718. The bell of Christ Church strikes once. Eleven fifty-five. They will hang him at noon. The harbour lies bright and deceptively orderly beneath the Bahamian sun. Since Governor Woodes Rogers arrived with the King’s Act of Grace and a fleet at his back, Nassau has been performing obedience. The pirate flags are gone. The taverns close earlier. The gallows remain. Eliza Vale stands three rows back from the scaffold erected beside the wharf. The air smells of tar, salt, and drying seaweed. British marines line the platform in crisp...
Weekly Contest #342
Alderwick wasn’t marked on most maps. Cartographers did not like arguments. Spanning exactly one mile, the town existed over a pocket of air that refused agreement—between two hills lay a stretch of atmosphere where solar current twisted with earth leyline, braided so tightly they couldn’t be ignored. Prior to construction, strange auroras had danced above the town and lightning struck up instead of down. Corn grew in spirals. Wells thrummed at night. But two wizards had come to that place with notebooks full of overlapping sketches and o...
15 September 1940RAF Biggin Hill, Kent They had been sitting outside the dispersal hut when the warning bell started again. The afternoon sun lay flat across the airfield. Someone had dragged a deck chair into a strip of shade. Cards were being dealt on an upturned crate; the pasteboards rasped softly against wood. A mug of tea sat cold between them. Above Kent, the sky was blue and almost careless. Flying Officer Thomas Hale sat apart from the game, his Mae West buckled over his tunic despite the heat. His helmet rested across his knees. Wh...
Weekly Contest #341
5 October 1792près d’Arras, Northern France We came to the orchard because it was still standing. Everything nearer the town had been taken by men, by lists, by the call of drums that never stopped long enough for silence to feel like peace. The apples had spoiled where they hung. Sweet, useless things rotting in the grass beneath trees too old to care, and when I stepped among them, my boots left dark bruises in the soil. I arrived before dawn, as promised. I knew already that whatever honour I had come to defend would not survive the morni...
Weekly Contest #340
“The Ferryman.” Four women in ten months. All victims were under thirty years old. Found barefoot and stretched across church pews; hands folded together neatly over their chests like they’d expected someone else to pray over them. Uniform slit throats – one swipe, no mess. Executed. Bodies washed clean. Neat. Methodical. No prints. No DNA. No witnesses. No motive. Except. The killer always left something behind. A silver coin underneath each woman’s tongue. Methodical. Precise. Organized. After four bodies, the 8th Precinct Homi...
To the individual who has contacted this department under the name “Northbound,” I am writing because you indicated in your last communication that you would continue to correspond only with a single officer. I have been assigned that role. This letter is not an admission of cooperation or concession. It is an acknowledgement of receipt. You claim to possess information regarding the locations of unidentified human remains connected to the missing persons cases currently catalogued under regional cold files 611 through 618. If that claim is ...
The new intruder steps into me at dawn. I feel the pressure of their presence before I see them, skin brushing stone, heartbeat pressing against silence. They are alone. They always are. That is the rule. I unfold quietly around their edges. I have been many things to many people: trial, punishment, sanctuary, curse. I am a place without a name, yet older than nations. I do not remember when I was made, only that I was given purpose. And that purpose is clear: None leaves. But this one, this one tastes like smoke on old marble. Something in ...
By the time the Hero returned, the village had already buried most of its joy. They still called it Mirefold, though there was no mire left, and not much to fold. Once, a river had braided through its hills, turning the soil to velvet. Now, the riverbed was cracked. The hills were half-shaved for trenchwork and timber. The war had taken the rest—roots and harvest, sons and songs. Still, they hung crimson banners from scorched beams. They sang. They toasted. Someone carved a likeness of Kael of Velshyr—the Hero—in softwood and mounted it wher...
The clock on my office wall accused me of murder at twelve-oh-seven. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Legally. The second hand lay snapped off at the base of the face, as if it had tried to keep going and failed. Beneath the glass, the red Court indicator pulsed once every three seconds—slow, deliberate, official. A street clock didn’t signal like that unless it had recorded a violent crime and decided the memory mattered. I stopped writing mid-line. Ink bled across my ledger, turning a neat column of fees and timestamps into a dark smear...
Weekly Contest #339
In the heart of Tallowmere Hollow, where the trees grew low and polite, and the flowers never dared bloom out of season, sat a bakery that regularly defied the laws of nature—and, on evil days, gravity. Crumb & Kindling, home of the finest elderflower turnovers in the valley and the only known hearth to sneeze when insulted, was run by the Bramblebake siblings: Tilla and Pip. At sunrise, the bakery’s shutters clattered open of their own accord, the hearth yawned, and somewhere in the rafters, a squirrel cursed softly as it spilt a jar of...
In Grindlewood, the trees didn’t just whisper — they eavesdropped. They leaned over the moss-covered trails, gnarled and ancient, heavy with mist and secrets. Roots twisted across the ground like drunken vipers. The canopy draped the world in green gloom, and somewhere overhead, a crow laughed — like it knew what was coming. Jinx Quickpaw flicked a slug off her boot with the tip of her dagger and scowled. “This forest smells like wet bark and tax evasion.” “That’s because it’s alive,” Miri Thistlewhip said calmly, kneeling beside a lichen-co...
Tessa Fairwill had been promised adventure. Not in those exact words—the Royal Bureaucracy of Eldwyn rarely used language that optimistic—but the recruitment scroll had definitely included “field work,magical engagement,” and “direct post-heroic impact.” So yes, she had envisioned dragons. Glory. Fireballs. A tasteful amount of shouting. Instead, on her first day, they gave her a clipboard, a reinforced quill, and a partner who smelled like burnt ink and old rules. “I’m Grent Velthorn,” he said without looking up from his desk. “Assignment o...
Weekly Contest #338
The book was already open when I found it, which felt rude. It lay on my desk between my government-issued study tablet and a cup of synth-coffee that tasted like regret. Its spine was cracked. Its pages were yellowed. Its existence was illegal in at least twelve clearly posted ways. I stared at it for a full ten seconds, waiting for the apartment’s monitoring system to scream. It didn’t. That was problem number one. Problem number two was the title, printed neatly on the first page in dark, confident ink: THE ARCHIVE OF THE UNLISTEDA record...
The first time Mara touched paper, she expected it to feel like the screens in the Museum—flat, cold, pretending to be old. It didn’t. It breathed beneath her fingertips, a dry whisper of fibres that caught on her skin like it had been waiting. The smell came next: dust and something faintly sweet, like dried flowers pressed too long between pages. It made the back of her throat ache with a memory she couldn’t place. The book was tablet-sized but heavier, bound in cracked leather, the colour of burnt sugar. No glow. No wake-swipe. No complia...
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