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Weekly Contest #338
Arcadie reaches for the sturdy old book with the dark green spine. It’s tucked snugly, obstinately almost, on the top shelf, too many inches away for her to reach without extending as far as she can and stretching herself into a cramp. Arcadie blows a sigh of exasperation at her four feet eleven inches and glances down the narrow corridor of books to see if there’s anyone else lurking. All is quiet in the library’s dark aisle. Lost in the far reaches of this damp and untellingly dark Wednesday afternoon. “Damn it!” Arcadie puts down he...
Weekly Contest #320
I remember how we used to clamber back up the path out of the woods, checking our watches that we got in the airport the time we went to Crete on holiday. That was our first ever trip abroad. Dad had seen it advertised as a last minute bargain in the travel agent’s window after he’d finished his early shift at the factory and had called into town on the way home to buy cheese and bacon at the market. My watch had Hong Kong Phooey on it with his arm spinning round as a second hand. My brother’s had a bear on it I think but don’t remember ...
Weekly Contest #319
Mabel Pollard was a well respected woman of good standing. Everyone in the town said so. She lived alone in her terraced house on Garden Street, where so many roses grew in summer and the children who dared to pick them, knew that Mabel would only smile and gently shoo them along. She attended church without fail, volunteered at the library, baked for every charity sale, and always had something polite to say. People described her as ‘kind’ or ‘dependable’, which Mabel accepted as any single and contented woman of a certain age would. S...
Weekly Contest #318
A smile crawled across his lips. The sort of smile that came during those in-between, horribly momentous occasions. When he was young, one such moment had followed his workings with a wax crayon on the back of an old cereal packet; It was on the event of his sixth birthday party. The cake had collapsed into a great quivering globule of uncooked batter as his mother pushed the mother-of-pearl handled carving knife into the frosted monstrosity. She’d fled from the room in tears whilst his father called her grotesque names through the obscu...
Weekly Contest #317
It was early autumn, a time of year that Beatie adored. Her inner world felt calmer, wrapped in a kind of golden melancholy, the heat and noise of the summer now put quietly to bed. The trees along the path to the allotments had begun to change as their leaves were touched with shades of amber, rust, and crimson, while the air was laden with the scent of damp earth and moss, and the setting in of decay. Beneath her boots the pavement was scattered with green horse chestnut shells, taken from the trees too early in the gale that had blown...
Weekly Contest #316
The great clock that hung in the station had been telling the wrong time for weeks. Its vast hands jerked forward with a tired stiffness, its fixings sometimes groaning a little, but no one seemed particularly troubled by it. Commuters continued to glance up at its face with a sort of resigned irritation, then check their watches to be sure. The station master had promised it would be ‘sorted out’ in due course, but nothing ever seemed to happen. Inside the station cafe, the smaller brass clock above the counter was no better, always five mi...
Weekly Contest #315
Danny’s mother, having almost cut the circulation off from her fingers, tied the final balloon and batted it across the living room to her son. “Right then Danny, your friends will be here soon. Go and wash your face and put on that clean shirt I’ve left on your bed.” “Okay mum!” Danny batted the balloon back at her as his mother returned to the kitchen to finish icing the dinosaur shaped birthday cake which she worried looked more like a duck than a diplodocus. “How many are coming?” Danny tore back down the stairs, fastening the buttons...
Weekly Contest #314
The lost man stands on the hill, looking down into the once green valley. As the sun pushes through a thin blue sky, the morning mist gently dissipates, revealing the shape of the countryside for miles around. “Blessed,” murmurs the lost man as he wipes the ground’s dewy moisture from the side of his face. Behind him, on the plateau, a solitary tree shifts slightly in the small breeze that has drifted its way from the beck below to join the lost man on the hill. Its companion looks at his hard, calloused hands, holding them aloft to the sky....
Weekly Contest #313
A spider only knows that you’re lying if the moon is in its first quarter and the cat’s milk has turned sour overnight. That’s what my great aunt always said when she suspected me of telling less than the facts. Though it always confused me as to the purpose of a spider and the divination of the truth. Six tall pine trees waved skywards towards their cloud companions that summer as I idled away the hours at my Great Aunt Dorothy’s large house. She was accompanying an elderly friend on a long desired excursion to Egypt and with no children of...
Weekly Contest #312
Iris had never really been fond of living close to the park. In summer, the shouts of over-excitable children carried across the lawns and through her windows in uninvited echoes. And in winter, the trees turned skeletal and pointed, seeming to lean closer to the house, as if they wanted to come in rather than watch from outside through the twilight. But, regardless of those irritations, the place had still been her home and she supposed she would miss it when she left. The house itself was a modest post-war semi with a pebble-dashed front a...
Weekly Contest #311
There’s an old swing that hangs from the branch of an ancient oak, deep in the wooded valley of Langtondale, nestled in England’s northern hills. Its ropes are brown and worn with age, smoothed by the hands of time. The wooden seat, sawn from the piano lid of some long dead child’s grandmother, is still sturdy and firm. It moves in tempo with the breeze that visits this small clearing by the river. And it is but the breeze and his more raucous cousin the wind, that now while away the hours in this secluded place.Not so many years have passed...
Weekly Contest #310
Even at the age of nine, I knew there was something inexplicably different about Eugene Westcote. To all intents and purposes, he was a typical boy of our generation. Grubby knees, snotty nose, with a particular fondness for semolina pudding and lead-painted soldiers. But all that aside, a peculiar air would sometimes sweep over the boy, seemingly out of nowhere. His nature would take on a disturbing sort of other-worldliness. He would become ridiculously perpendicular, gaining inches in height, or it would appear so at least, and he would a...
Weekly Contest #309
A dark marble tomb sits high on a gloomy knoll to the west of Darksford cemetery. Its distinctive edifice, carved with skilfully crafted words, glints in the sunlight on the rarest of fine days, when the rhododendron bushes part their leafy green hands and allow the unassuming passerby to catch a glance of the monolith that waits there. *** It was on one such day that George Godfrey, a writer of sorts and part time curator at the town’s library, was taking a purposeless meander through Darksford cemetery in search of something he knew not....
Weekly Contest #308
The bear with red cherries for eyes grinned horribly as it carefully manicured its dreadful claws with the emery board discovered at the back of the bathroom cabinet.“All the creatures of far and beyond will play a part in your demise,” it whispered through fish-tainted breath.Damon reached for the fork but it wasn’t there. Forks were banned from the house, ever since the incident with his mother and the postman.The cherries glistened, full of demonic fruitiness. Damon grasped again, the back of his hand brushed the bottle of indigestion rem...
Weekly Contest #307
It’s a warm Monday morning in early August, and Kyle Deans is feeling stuffy and uncomfortable in the uniform of his new school. The navy woollen blazer itches and his tie feels as though it’s cutting off his airways. The trousers are tight around his middle, and the shoes, brown brogues, polished within an inch of their life, squeak with every hesitant step, rubbing the back of his ankles. Kyle’s usual attire, grey Nike tracksuit, Air Max trainers and hoodie, is now hidden away in a locked black box, along with his phone, earbuds, and his i...
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