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Winner of Contest #255 🏆
For the record, I really wasn’t trying to kill myself. I know what it looks like. I grew up in the northeast; I should have known the dangers of a February night and a lakeshore buried in snow. I do remember being little, maybe five years old, and hearing my parents (bright, young, sober) discussing a boy who had frozen to death by my school. They said it was a soft, painless way to go, and that was what made February dangerous: you felt, there at the end, like you were calm and safe and even warm. You had to be smart to keep yourself from s...
Winner of Contest #254 🏆
I don’t really know how to tell this story. For a start, there are some logistical difficulties – I’ll get to those later – but even without those, I don’t know how to explain it all. I guess I’ll start when we saw each other at the club after four years apart. That night, my head was pounding with noise and my heart was burning with hurt, and I’d come to the club alone – a stupid move for a girl, some part of me still said, though I hadn’t looked like a girl in public for over a year. I threw myself into the sweaty, rainbow-hued crowd prepa...
Submitted to Contest #99
Feb 10. I had the dream again last night. It went the same way it always did when I was in junior high - it would start out about something else, and then through some shadowed door or opening which hadn’t been there before, the knight would step out into the open. Ancient One, he’d say, and his voice would have that unfamiliar lilt to it, the lilt that had told me long ago he belonged to another world. The kingdom needs you again. I can’t really control what I do, in the dreams. Something leads me that’s not my common sense. So t...
Submitted to Contest #98
James Thorne went out to the forest as the sun was turning honey-colored on the horizon. He wore his best suit, pressed by his maid an hour beforehand, sharp navy blue against white. No briefcase, no wallet, nothing that could be stolen except the cell phone in his pants pocket; and in his breast pocket, of course, nestled as close to his heart as possible, the seed. He pressed the heel of his hand over that seed, nearly hard enough to hurt. He held it there as he waved for his driver to stop. He peered out into the woods’ deepening gloom; ...
Well. Here he stood, now, at the end of it all. The desert loomed wide before him, sand still radiating heat up through his boot-soles, sky shrouded in the deep blackness of new night. A great void of emptiness and thirst set to swallow him. Oliver wore loose-fitting clothes and a soft, sand-colored hood over his head. He carried a bag over one shoulder packed with food and water for a day or two. Besides that, they’d stripped him of all his possessions - not a single copper coin or even a map to guide him. Well, of course, what ...
Submitted to Contest #67
The air, when we dropped anchor, was the kind that froze your bones in place if you stood still too long. I never loved these climates in my younger years; the tropics were the place for me, warm breezes in my hair, sun glinting off my sword’s blade when it found another bloody mark. But recently I’d come to like the cold quiet of the north. It made me feel something akin to peace, at moments. A rare thing for me.“You’re sure this is the place, captain?” said Lucy.I surveyed the view in front of me. A meager hunk of rock, no larger than our ...
Winner of Contest #61 🏆
I caught a late flight from the west coast to the funeral. Landed in Pittsburgh at four in the morning, not early enough to check into my hotel and get any sleep, not late enough to have gotten any real rest on the plane. My eyes felt heavy and itchy as I went through the motions of picking up my bags, catching a cab to the dingy hotel I’d selected for affordability, dropping off my bags, and picking up a greasy Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich just as the sun was rising. It was mid-May, but it was cold in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania di...
Submitted to Contest #50
“She’ll take the same,” he said, in a voice so careless, so quiet and easy and unconcerned, that it made me want to scream. It was the first time he’d openly referred to me since we’d formally met half an hour ago. He hadn’t turned to me, hadn’t looked at my face, hadn’t stooped to ask me a question himself; he gestured with his long, elegant, ring-bedecked fingers behind him and to his right, where I stood with my hands clasped and my mouth shut. As though it were only natural he should speak for me without my consent. The servant only gla...
Submitted to Contest #46
She asked me, last night, to tell her a story. She’s changed since the day I pulled her out of the collapsing star that was our home. Since I snatched her from his gaping black-hole clutches and fled, holding her too close and too tight like I was turning her back into a part of me, since I drove haphazard and wild out of the state with her clamped in my arms, swerving through traffic and through tears. Her eyes are a little less wide and afraid. Her voice is a tiny bit clearer. She asked me to tell her a bedtime story. It’s not the kind o...
Submitted to Contest #43
“You didn’t finish so very far ahead of me, you know,” said Hare, when the other animals had moved off and the stars were spinning through the sky. Tortoise looked at him, blinking slowly. “Come again?” “We crossed the finish line practically at the same time.” Hare did his best to speak slowly enough that Tortoise could hear; no one understood him when he spoke as fast as his thoughts ran. “I was only a few seconds behind you. If I’d woken up a few seconds earlier, I still would have beaten you.” “That’s true enough,” said Tortoise ag...
Winner of Contest #42 🏆
It’s a long way down. So long that looking down feels like falling, and looking out you can’t quite tell which way is up, and looking up you might as well be adrift in an ocean the size of the universe. My toes curl at the sight, a vain attempt to make the worn-out soles of my sneakers grip harder on the polished stone. “Do I really have to?” I say. My guide chuckles. He’s a large, lumbering sort of man, broad-shouldered and deep-voiced, and the chuckle sounds like two boulders crashing together. He introduced himself to me as the spir...
Submitted to Contest #42
I’m dying. I’ve been aware of it for a while, of course, in an abstract sort of way. The weight dropping off my body, the fatigue settling into my bones, the feeling like all the power and strength I’ve accrued in ninety-six years is slowly seeping out of me. I’ve known since the chemo stopped that I won’t leave this year alive. But I’m feeling it now in a different way. Death as something concrete, as something personal, has crept up upon me. Now I know it in some deep cavity below my wisping lungs. Ananya, I think now. I haven’t thou...
Submitted to Contest #41
Mrs. Sheffey’s apartment is a mess. As I stand numbly on a patch of clear floor, she picks her way over stools, boxes, stacks of books, and cat toys to the refrigerator in the corner. There’s a certain manic energy to her movements I wish I had the wherewithal to match. Instead I only watch her, hands hanging awkward at my sides, and keep one eye out for the cat.“The food’s down here,” she says. “Half a can in the morning, and half in the afternoon. And in the afternoon you can check her water bowl to see if she needs more.”“Mmm,” I say.&nbs...
Submitted to Contest #36
It’s been quiet here.I don’t mean the sounds. It’s just - all so clean,airtight,vacuum-packed and controlled.So careful.We with our treadmills, working our legs each dayso we don’t forget what it is to walkwhile we float through the star-drenched heavens -incredible thing, to land on rock againand know you’ve returned to a world that flows. - diary aboard Odysseus I, day 1 of contact(this is shit. i know it’s shit. i’ll edit it later. they’re really counting on me to turn out some god-tier poetry - everyone else here is a hardcore ...
Submitted to Contest #35
On the day the snow started turning to rivers, Nicki barged into the house at sunset with her hands clamped together, and I knew there was going to be more trouble. I’d been just about to finish my multiplication homework; I was seated at the kitchen table with three problems left. Mother had just gone out the back door to check our basil plants or Nicki would have been seen. “Dina,” she gasped, stumbling toward me. Her hair was a wild, white-blonde cloud around her head, and her shins were soaked with melted snow. “You need to come up...
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